Poetry

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Gascoyne’s friend and editor Roger Scott, comprises work that the poet chose to preserve, together with uncollected and unpublished material; all meticulously researched from notebooks and manuscripts held in the British Library and internationally in academic institutions.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.  

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.

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.

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...

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...

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  

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...