Books

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,...

Poems for and about Edward Thomas.   Compiled by Anne Harvey, with an introduction by Vernon Scannell.

The Orchid Boat by Lee Harwood is a weave of stories: some personal, some historical, some real, some imaginary. Often these stories may co-exist in a poem just as they do in one's everyday mind, as a collage mirroring our own perception of the world. a singer of beautiful and poignant songs Chicago Review

Clavics An elegiac sequence, mourning for the musician William Lawes who was killed at the Battle of Chester in 1645. Delicately constructed, each page has a section made up of two stanzas, together forming the shape of a key. Before long, however, the tone makes it clear that nothing is to be taken at face value. Amongst the lines are provocations and incongruities, playful references and about-turns. Clavics is a celebration of seventeenth-century music and poetry, yet is confrontational and sometimes shockingly modern. From one line to the next you may be pulled out of a potently evoked moment of history....

Here, scattered light falls across landscapes and memories. These new poems are among Jeremy Hooker’s finest. They extend his thinking about powerful crosscurrents that constitute the ‘sacred’, and deepen his exploration of history embodied in landscape. This collection contains a variety of short, ‘light’ poems, longer poems, and sequences such as 'Saltgrass Lane' and 'Hurst Castle' that dig deeper into his childhood terrain on the Hampshire coastline.

"The Cut of the Light" draws extensively on Jeremy Hooker's poetry written over a period of forty years. It shows the development of a poetry concerned with nature and history and the spirit of place, and comprises both formal variety and the 'art of seeing' which relates Hooker to a vital tradition of British and American poetry. The book contains early, previously unpublished poems and some new versions of later work. It represents the best of a consistently exploratory poet whose work is celebrated for its power and delicacy. A sumptuous hardback, this book is an excellent gift for a poetry lover.

Part of Enitharmon's print and poem series of co-publications with Jealous Gallery.  Howard's print is accompanied by Anne Sexton's poem 'Her Kind' from To Bedlam and Part Way Back (first published 1960)© Linda Gray Sexton The print and poem are presented in a screen-printed bound portfolio. Six-colour screenprint on Somerset Velvet Antique 280 gsm 35 x 28.5 cm, torn edges Poem is a one-colour print on an accompanying Somerset Velvet Antique 280 gsm sheet.   To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) Anne Sexton Her Kind I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light...

Single sheet designed and printed by Sebastian Carter at the Rampant Lions Press to advertise publication of Christopher Le Brun's artist’s book with Enitharmon, a collaboration with the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Printed on Arches Vélin 160gsm. Title page on one side and prospectus on the other side. A collectible item for a bibliophile – could be framed or stored loose with other literary treasures.

Behold is Nicki Jackowska’s seventh book of poetry. The last decade has seen a marked change in position, language and sensibility. She is more daring in her juxtapositions, the creation of dimensions whereby one world seeps through another. The title poem is the crown of this book’s achievement, where history (the Holocaust) is woven among precise particulars, the mundane detail. Together with her working-class English roots, this European consciousness creates an extraordinary spectrum of awareness and evocation. Many of the poems are akin to dramatic monologues, moving from a Lewes garden party to characters in a Brighton terrace and thence to...

Marine John Kinsella and Alan Jenkins, two very different poets, discovered that their new work both dealt with the sea. Marine brings those poems together and others written since, all dealing with the sea in its many moods and weathers. With people's relationship to and exploitation of their marine environment, from the Indian Ocean to the shores of the Atlantic. The two poets' highly distinctive voices complement each other in a powerful counterpoint.

John Kinsella and Alan Jenkins, two very different poets, discovered that their new work both dealt with the sea. Marine brings those poems together and others written since, all dealing with the sea in its many moods and weathers. With people's relationship to and exploitation of their marine environment, from the Indian Ocean to the shores of the Atlantic. The two poets' highly distinctive voices also complement each other in a powerful counterpoint. This is a signed limited clothbound edition of 35 copies.   Special signed editions are too valuable to send out via regular postage channels. We therefore use a courier to send...

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...

These poems represent an act of reclamation or capture; an attempt to retrieve someone whose loss has been experienced through illness and finally death. Taking as an epigraph a line from Richard Wilbur "… a thing is most itself when likened" Kapos discovers various viewpoints from which to try to see the thing "being most itself". In every case metaphor is the guiding principle in these poems, which address how a figure is brought back to life through a process whose essence is poetic. The Likeness is a sustained elegy, an unfolding study in psychology and visual observation, and an...

Supreme Being Following her prize-winning first collection, Martha Kapos again captures an extraordinary range of perceptions and emotion. Her style is highly original, a sort of internal Cubism, conveying a feeling-state by observing it precisely through many sharply nuanced images and from many angles. She creates a distinctive, unique atmosphere - graver here than in her previous collection. Supreme Being is both a huge hymn of praise for 'life', for ordinary experiencing, and at the same time faces very movingly and directly the incomprehensibility of loss. The loss of someone else, deeply known and loved, and the awareness, too, of the coming loss of the...

Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following in the tradition of Bash?, Buston, Shiki, Issa, and other poets, Kerouac experimented with this centuries-old genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form's essence. He incorporated his 'American' haiku in novels and in his correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings. In this edition, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich has supplemented a core haiku manuscript from Kerouac's archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haiku, from...

C. Day Lewis: Selected Poems In this centenary edition of C. Day Lewis's poems, Jill Balcon has substantially extended her husband's own Penguin selections of 1951 and 1969, including not only his last collection The Whispering Roots (1970), but also vers d'occasion written when he was Poet Laureate and a number of the Posthumous Poems. This broad retrospective allows the reader a proper view of the technical variety and range of Day Lewis's work, from the pastoral lyrics of his youth, inspired by Hardy and Yeats, through the political verse of the 1930s, to the reflective and more personal poems of...

In July 1943 the young Welsh poet and soldier Alun Lewis, already recognised as one of the outstanding writers of his generation, arrived on sick leave at the house near Madras of Freda Aykroyd, a devotee of literature and the wife of a British scientist. Lewis and Aykroyd fell in love instantly, recognising in each other similar temperaments and artistic interests. Their affair, which lasted until Lewis’s mysterious death on the Arakan Front in March 1944, inspired some of the finest of his wartime poems as well as an extraordinary cache of letters published here for the first time. The...

Jim Dine’s vivid, candid and detailed reminiscences about his friendship and working relationship with Aldo Crommelynck (1931-2008), the legendary printer of Matisse and Picasso, over a period of more than 30 years are full of affection, humour and layer upon layer of information. In conversations with Marco Livingstone, Dine charts the extent to which his experience of working with Aldo, a man who was not only a great printer but also a skilled draughtsman, enriched his experience of France on every level. From an appreciation of its art and culture, its city life and countryside, to its food and its specialist shops, Dine’s ruminations also...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

Volodya This groundbreaking collection draws together for the first time Mayakovsky’s key translators from the 1930s to the present day, bringing some remarkable works back into print in the process and introducing poems which have never before been translated. The radical scope of its representation makes for the most comprehensive account of Mayakovsky’s work to date – an account which charts not only the extraordinary range of his creative output, his rigorous and passionate innovation of language and form, and the intense power of his electrifying live performances, but also the fascinating and turbulent history of Mayakovsky’s cultural and political representation in...

Texas 1964 represents an amazing discovery.  Duane Michals, one of America’s pre-eminent photographers completed a project in 1964 to depict different aspects of the state of Texas.  Michals recently discovered in his archive ‘Duane’s Texas tempest in a teapot treasure trove’, the whole brilliant and resonant portrait of that celebrated state – captivating black-and-white images published here for the first time. Tender, witty, poignant and truthful, Duane Michals’ Texas 1964 captures a society in some ways unchanged from its first controversial settlement, with its racial divisions and economic and social gulfs, and in others redolent of the new America – commercialised, confident, forward-looking. Texas 1964 has...