Books

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...

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...

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...

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...

Sonnets to Orpheus In 55 sonnets, Rainer Maria Rilke plays an astonishing set of philosophical and sensual variations on the Orpheus myth. ‘Praising, that’s it!’ he declares; nature, art, love, time, childhood, technology, poverty, justice – all are encompassed in poems that spark with insight, among the most joyful and light-footed that Rilke ever wrote.  

An astonishing discovery was made in 1995 during the British Library's removal from the British Museum. Thirty-four letters and eighteen draft poems, including ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, ‘Dead Man's Dump’ and ‘Returning, We Hear the Larks’ by the major First World War poet Isaac Rosenberg, were found in a bundle of papers stored by former museum keeper Laurence Binyon, himself a poet and Rosenberg's mentor. The newly discovered papers include all Rosenberg's complete letters and draft poems to Binyon and the poet Gordon Bottomley, together with material about Rosenberg from family, friends and mentors such as his sister...

Isaac Rosenberg has long been regarded as one of the most important artistic figures of the First World War. His poems, such as 'Dead Man's Dump' and 'Break of Day in the Trenches', have been included in every significant war anthology and have earned him a place in Poets' Corner. He studied at the Slade School of Art at the same time as Stanley Spencer and Mark Gertler, showing promise as a painter. His poverty, education and background made him an outsider, yet it was just that experience which equipped him to cope with the unforeseen horror of war in...

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...

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...

Edward Upward: Art and Life Upward (1903-2009), a novelist and short story writer, is famous for being the unknown member of the W. H. Auden circle. However, he was revered by his peers – Auden, Day Lewis, Isherwood and Spender – for his intellect, literary gifts and unswerving political commitment. His lifelong friendship with Isherwood was forged at school and university, so each regarded the other as the first reader of his work. At Cambridge they invented the bizarre village of Mortmere, which with its combination of reality and fantasy had an important role in shaping the dominant British literary culture of...