Books

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...

I Have Found a Song is a fascinating collection of poems and images published to mark the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. It originated in a commission from Arts Council England for 12 poets to write on the theme of enslavement. Interspersed with these are exciting visual contributions by five artists invited by Enitharmon to produce work on the same theme. This de luxe edition is limited to 35 copies, each accompanied by a portfolio of 5 signed original prints: Paula Rego 'Death Goes Shopping' (Etching with Aquatint, 460 x 555mm) Sonia Boyce 'Is this love that I'm feeling?' (Etching,...

In the Orchard is not so much a collection of poems about birds as a book of memories and rare moments in which a number of familiar birds have played a spark-like role in bringing poems about. They are chiefly lyrical in character and range in time from 'Resurrection' written over fifty years ago to recent poems like 'The Bully Thrush', but they are not ordered chronologically and shouldn't be associated with events in the poet's private life. The etchings by Alan Turnbull are the result of his patient and painstaking study of each bird as it relates to the...

Radio Waves: Poems Celebrating the Wireless In 1927, a writer in the Radio Times declared it unsurprising that poets should write about radio. '...for the new magic, which pours the music of the concert room into the stillness of the cottage and brings the song of nightingales into the heart of Town, is the very stuff of poetry.' That early fascination with the power of the invisible waves that transmit thoughts around the globe persists. It continues to draw poems from writers who find a kinship of both forms as purveyors of 'pictures in the mind'. It therefore remains unique in the constantly evolving...

ONE OF THE TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 Over the last 15 years, Keston Sutherland has gained a towering reputation in experimental poetry, internationally recognised as one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. Poetical Works collects all the work he wishes to publish into a single volume, including his recent The Odes to TL61P, Hot White Andy, Stress Position, Neocosis, Antifreeze, The Stats on Infinity and new poem ‘Jenkins Moore and Bird’.   "Keston Sutherland’s Poetical Works  immediately takes its place among the most essential works of literature in English in this new millennium."  Julian Murphet,  Chicago Review Read the full review here.

The Odes to TL61P is a suite of five massive, turbulent, tender and satirical odes written and revised from 2010-13. It is the explicit history of the author's sexual development from early infancy; a commentary on the social and political history of the UK since the election of the coalition government; a philosophical account of the common meaning of secrecy in the most intimate, private experiences and in international diplomacy; a wild work of revolutionary theory that investigates in minute detail the difference between commodities and human lives; a record of a thousand revisions, deletions and metamorphoses; an attempt to radically...

Branch-Lines When Edward Thomas died in the First World War, very few of his poems had been published, but he is now recognised as one of the finest and most influential poets of the last century. Although often referred to as ‘a poet’s poet’, his writing has an almost universal appeal. He wrote accessibly, on traditional themes – the natural world, human relationships, transience and mortality. And yet his poetry is alive with the critical intelligence that came from years of writing non-fiction and reviewing verse. Branch-Lines captures the range of Thomas’s achievement, not least by combining poetry with prose. In this...

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...

A collection that is both moving and funny, elegiac and playful. The personal poems span a life-time as Thwaite relives moments of childhood, or reassesses his role as son to a dying mother, or gets told how to behave by his grandson. Elsewhere he laments his old cat and conjures up a Sumerian Anthology of poets. The principal concern of the collection is what lasts and what vanishes: dreams, memories, people and objects. In this quest, he takes us with him to Italy, Siberia and Syria, and is haunted by the mystery of places ‘where there are no words’. It...

Going Out At eighty-four, Anthony Thwaite said that Going Out was likely to be the last book of poems he published in his lifetime, and that the title was apt. But the words are wistful, even playful, and that is true of some of the book's contents. The poems range over times and places, commemorating friends, and draw on memories, hard-won faith, and self-questioning. As Michael Frayn put it, Thwaite 'writes with simplicity and precision about difficult and ambiguous things, the complexity and unceasingness of the world, the vastness and richness of the past, the elusiveness of the present – and the...

A legendary figure among the ‘Auden generation’ of young writers in the 1930s, Edward Upward continued writing into his late nineties. This new selection of his best short stories spans a literary career of almost eight decades, and was published to celebrate his centenary in 2003. Beginning in 1928 with the fantastical world of Mortmere in The Railway Accident, the stories continue through the era of political engagement in the Thirties to the reflective and poignant studies of old age that have underpinned his revival in the past decade. Together they represent a lifetime of achievement in modern literature.  

The rediscovery of Edward Upward’s work excited enthusiastic comment among reviewers and readers when in 1994 Enitharmon published The Mortmere Stories, An Unmentionable Man and a revised version of Journey to the Border. The five short stories in this new volume, all written in recent years, reconfirm what Edward Mendelson in the Times Literary Supplement has described as Upward’s ‘unique perfected style . . . that gives ordinary events a hallucinatory strangeness and renders dreams as if they were entirely ordinary, subject to the same ethical and political judgements appropriate to the daylight world.'  

These stories (one novella-length, six shorter) testify to Edward Upward’s continuing creativity into his mid-nineties. They interweave elements from every period of his work: railway accidents and Kafkaesque dreams recall his earliest; concern for the survival of humanity maintains the left-wing commitment of his middle years; and the more contemplative note of his later writing now deepens with the themes of ageing, bereavement and death. The protagonists are threatened by a malevolent state and socio-political violence, but sustained by visions of a better future and the restorative of sexual love. The precise observation and lucid dialogue that always marked Upward’s...

An Unmentionable Man is a collection of short stories. The first four of these short stories by Edward Upward, form a closely linked sequence - almost a single story - and could be described as 'realistic dreams'. They are vivid and often satirical, the product of long experience, but are neither cynical nor finally pessimistic. In certain inherited ways they resemble Upward's earlier fantasies 'The Railway Accident' and Journey to the Border, both published by Enitharmon. Of the last two stories, 'Fred and Lil' is straightforwardly realistic and humbly sympathetic, while 'With Alan to the Fair' deals with love, hate and political extremism in...

This checklist is a bibliography of Enitharmon Press publications produced during the Directorship of Stephen Stuart-Smith from the first year of his appointment, until 2002.    

Pearl is one of the greatest English Medieval poems, a dream vision that is both a profoundly personal elegy for the dreamer’s lost daughter and a subtle theological debate about the most difficult existential questions. In this parallel text edition the original poem is printed opposite a modernised version which retains all the formal features of the original – its elaborate musical schemes of alliteration and rhyme, and its rich vocabulary. Words unfamiliar to the contemporary reader are glossed alongside the modernisation so that the poem can easily be read by anybody not familiar with its idiom. In her introduction...

Denton Welch, one of the most gifted creative artists of his generation, died in 1948 at the age of thirty-one, leaving this, perhaps his finest work, almost but not quite completed. Under the thin disguise of fiction Denton Welch recreates the world of hospitals and nursing homes in which he spent so many months after the accident which was eventually to prove fatal to him. The details of daily routine, the fellow patients, the nurses and doctors, the comedies and tragedies which loom so large in the confined existence of the sick, all are described so vividly, with so much...