Books

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...

'Susie Glenn was the only person who used to say on hearing the front door open, is that you, my little darling? She made words sound good. Like her name. When she arrived, she said, I’ll thank you to use the Susie and the Glenn. I guess she was friendly to both.' Designed in Collis by Michael Mitchell at Libanus Press, limited to 50 numbered and signed copies. Printed on 170gsm Munken Pure (cream) by Gomer Press. The copies have been bound and slipcased by The Fine Book Bindery, using marbled papers hand-made by Jemma Lewis Marbling, Harmatan Orange 19 natural grain...

John Montague writes: 'Younger writers need older ones to look up to; or at least I did, lacking a father in the ordinary sense. And pilgrimages of that imaginative kind give meaning to one’s reading and travel. For years, I would call to see the great poet and artist David Jones (1895-1974) in London, first in his dugout; then in hospital and finally in the Calvary Nursing Home. I loved his detailed gentle mind, so different from the tactical ferocity of Hugh MacDiarmid, another Celtic master I was fond of. Our link was René Hague, a neighbour from East Cork,...

Paul Muldoon has been interested in writing songs, sonnets and music for at least twenty years over which time he has collaborated with composers as various as Mark-Anthony Turnage, Warren Zevon, and Wayside Shrines, the Princeton-based musical collective of which he is a founder member. A book which brings together poems and lyrics from a writer who has been described by the Irish Times as 'a force of nature.' The collection also contains this force.   ‘..."poem-songs" best describes this collection. They are complex, charged performances that vibrate in the interim between one thing and the other. They'll rock your world.’ GUARDIAN Also available as...

‘Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection, Plan B, an exquisitely produced collaboration with Norman McBeath, the Scottish photographer.“I sat one evening with the photographs and copies of the poems and, like the kind of party host we've all been encouraged to believe ourselves to be, allowed them to get into conversation with each other”, writes Muldoon of his collection, which, he says, was “curated by the poems and photographs themselves”. Typically, he's given this new genre a distinctive new name: photoetry.’ – Observer  

De luxe edition consisting of 150 slipcased copies. Plan B was bound by The Fine Book Bindery in Dubletta rust-coloured cloth and housed in a slipcase. Paul Muldoon and Norman McBeath signed each numbered copy. Neither merely a poetry collection nor merely a photography book, this collection crosses over genres. ‘Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection. Plan B is an exquisitely produced collaboration with Norman McBeath, the Scottish photographer.“ I sat one evening with the photographs and copies of the poems and, like the kind of party host we've all...

Paul Muldoon's long interest in music led him to collaborate with composers such as Mark-Anthony Turnage, Warren Zevon, and Wayside Shrines. Songs and Sonnets brings together poems and lyrics from a writer described as 'a force of nature.'   ‘..."poem-songs" best describes these songs and sonnets. They are complex, charged performances that vibrate in the interim between one thing and the other. They'll rock your world.’ GUARDIAN   Special signed editions are too valuable to send out via regular postage channels. We therefore use a courier to send them to you. We hope that you can appreciate why there will be an appropriate shipping charge to accommodate...

De luxe edition consisting of 150 slipcased copies. Plan B was bound by The Fine Book Bindery in Dubletta rust-coloured cloth and housed in a slipcase. Paul Muldoon and Norman McBeath signed each numbered copy. Neither merely a poetry collection nor merely a photography book, this collection thereby crosses over genres. ‘Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection. Plan B is an exquisitely produced collaboration with Norman McBeath, the Scottish photographer.“ I sat one evening with the photographs and copies of the poems and, like the kind of party host we've...

Paul Muldoon & Philip Pearlstein It is perhaps the accidental collaborations that can prove the most imaginative and charming, as in this beautifully conceived artist’s book bringing together the Pulitzer-prizewinning poet Paul Muldoon and one of his artistic heroes, the eminent American painter Philip Pearlstein, long revered as one of the modern masters of figurative art. Sparkling new sequences of poems accompany lively watercolours which, as the artist explains, are ‘mostly of terra cotta objects…vessels and fragments of gods, goddesses, and demons from various ancient cultures.’ In his introduction Paul Muldoon sets the scene: ‘When I’d first asked Philip Pearlstein if he...

Paul Muldoon & Philip Pearlstein It is perhaps the accidental collaborations that can prove the most imaginative and charming, as in this beautifully conceived artist’s book bringing together the Pulitzer-prizewinning poet Paul Muldoon and one of his artistic heroes, the eminent American painter Philip Pearlstein, long revered as one of the modern masters of figurative art. Sparkling new sequences of poems accompany lively watercolours which, as the artist explains, are ‘mostly of terra cotta objects…vessels and fragments of gods, goddesses, and demons from various ancient cultures.’ In his introduction Paul Muldoon sets the scene: ‘When I’d first asked Philip Pearlstein if he...

Earth's Almanac The poems in Newlyn's book emerged over a fifteen-year period following the untimely death of the poet's sister. She adapts the form of the 'Shepherd's Calendar' to the phases of grief, condensing a long process of reflection and remembering into the passage of a single year. The poems shift through forms and move between places – Oxford, Borrowdale, and finally Cornwall, where the poet finds a second home near the sea. In these intense expressions of love and loss, anger and guilt, there is no smooth path towards consolation.  

Since the 1960s, poetry in French has been understood in terms of two competing approaches: searching for ‘presence’ on the one hand, ‘litte?ralite?’ – refiguring the everyday – on the other. Contemporary forms of both are found in this anthology, from the ‘new lyricism’ of Bonhomme and Maulpoix to the refracted politics of ‘post-poetry’ in Tarkos and Gleize. The dichotomy, however, quickly breaks down and many poets refuse to be categorised in this way: recent publications include the interdisciplinary and collaborative work of poets such as Alferi, Chaton, Game and Macher; the focus on formal constraint in Me?tail and Espitallier;...

Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl pays tribute to the courage and humour displayed, in suffering, by the people of Chernobyl following April 1986.  Each segment paints an intimate picture: some elements of everyday life remain unchanged, others are profoundly altered.  The collection’s recurring motifs of black and white signal how all are silenced, reduced to anonymity – which in turn engenders fierce solidarity.  Meanwhile, men and machines toil side by side to tackle the insurmountable.  Petrucci’s use of scientific and medical terminology makes his descriptions chillingly precise.  In contrast we hear the deeply personal accounts of real people struggling to cope with...

RUTH PITTER (1897 - 1992) Pitter’s Collected Poems, originally published by Enitharmon in 1990, gathers together the finest of her poems, which in Kathleen Raine’s judgement 'will survive as long as the English language, with whose expressiveness in image and idea she has kept faith, remains'. In the introduction Elizabeth Jennings, herself among the most distinguished of contemporary poets, pays tribute to Pitter’s ‘acute sensibility and deep integrity’ and refers to her precision in observing Nature, her skill with verse forms and the frequency with which she achieves a 'beautifully communicated vision’. 'One of the truest and most dedicated poets of her...

Sooner or Later Frank finds Jeremy Reed optimising his London quarter of Soho and the West End, its outlaws, opportune strangers and rogue mavericks condensed into poems coloured by an imagery that pushes pioneering edges towards final frontiers. Right on the big city moment, and with an eye for arresting acute visual detail, Reed makes the capital into personal affairs. His characteristic love of glamour, rock music, seasonal step-changes, and a Ballardian preoccupation with the visionary render this new S Recommendation, in John Ashbery's words on Reed's recent work, 'a dazzling tour de force.'  

Voodoo Excess In this volume, Jeremy Reed charts in poetry and prose the astonishing career of the Rolling Stones. Starting from the band’s early days in 1962 leading up to the 50th anniversary tour in 2012 and its extension in 2013. With great originality, he examines why the Stones have been a musical and cultural phenomenon. Along with this, he includes everything public and mythical, anecdotal and apocryphal about the larger-than-life individual band members.   DRIFT AWAY It’s like looking across a busy docks a harbour industry to find the stage remote as the modular ISS, the band isolated as astronauts doing moon-hops for...

This is How You Disappear celebrates the dead and missing friends who were the formative and enduring influences on Reed's life as a poet. Using the elegy to imaginatively recreate the often extraordinary individual characteristics of his subjects, Reed's personal book of the dead is one that burns with his customary dynamic for dazzling imagery, glows with compassion for the suffering, and sparkles with a visual retrieval of detail so acute it hurts. With the title taken from the first line of a Scott Walker song, 'Rawhide', This is How You Disappear is elegiac poetry at its most brilliant.

This collection centres on the legendary figure of the jazz singer Billie Holiday (1915-59), 'Lady Day', whose talent propelled her from poverty in Baltimore to fame as a vocalist in Harlem nightclubs and international celebrity through her recordings with Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. But her life was scarred by personal tragedy and by the drug addiction that led to her premature death. From this dramatic material Reed creates a highly charged series of poems and prose pieces, some spoken by Billie herself, some by the poet as narrator, which brilliantly illuminate the singer's world and the heady atmosphere of the...

Jeremy Reed’s dynamically energised new collection Candy 4 Cannibals finds him again pushing new frontiers of language and subject matter out to the edge, as his starting point. His impacted day-to-day London life, using the capital as the basis for poems powered up by a characteristic immersion in subcultures, is offset by deeply personal recollections of two dead friends, the poet Lee Harwood and the sixties fashion entrepreneur Bill Franks. Reed’s acute originality and an imagination described by J. G. Ballard as ‘unique, almost extraterrestrial in its talent’ again combine to create a poetry that literally dazzles in its spectacular...

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...

Full of the macabre touches and dark humour that have made Paula Rego’s reputation, Stone Soup is a new version of the traditional Portuguese folktale by her daughter, the designer and writer Cas Willing. The fable has existed in numerous incarnations for centuries. In contrast to many others, the wily protagonist in this version is female. We follow the efforts of a young female traveller in her attempt to save herself from starvation. She persuades suspicious townspeople to supply her with food for her mysterious Stone Soup. Hence, this is a tale typically read to children to encourage cooperation in times of scarcity....

Full of the macabre touches and dark humour that have made Paula Rego's reputation, Stone Soup is a new version of the traditional Portuguese folktale by her daughter, the designer and writer, Cas Willing. Typically read to children to encourage cooperation in times of scarcity, the fable has existed in numerous incarnations for centuries. We follow the efforts of a young female traveler in her attempt to save herself from starvation, persuading a suspicious townspeople to supply her with food for her mysterious Stone Soup. All of the thirteen watercolour and ink paintings are reproduced here, bringing together Rego's expressive...

Anniversary Reid’s wife, the actress Lucinda Gane, died in October 2005. The poems he wrote about her death were published by Areté Books in a volume titled A Scattering. The volume was chosen as Costa Book of the Year 2009, the first collection of poems in ten years to be so honoured. Josephine Hart, chair of the Costa judges, described it as ‘austere and beautiful and moving’ and ‘a master work by a man who for sad reasons has met artistically his moment’. On the tenth anniversary of his loss, he returns to elegy in ten poems addressed directly to Lucinda. Aspects of...

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...