Poetry

Sebastian Barker’s final collection weaves a rich tapestry from the powerful themes that have always been central human questions: how we make our journey through life, how we love those around us, what the nature of belief and of our own mortality is. In the opening sequence, Barker contrasts life’s ecstasies with the certainty of loss; in The Land of Gold he travels through the blazing spiritual landscapes of South-West France; while in ‘The Tablets of the Bread’ he faces the temptations of despair head on. All these themes then receive a masterly summation in ‘A Monastery of Light’, where...

The poetry of Frances Cornford (1886–1960) was admired in her lifetime for its simple and direct language, its memorable images, and its perceptive observations. Her Collected Poems (1954) was the Choice of the Poetry Book Society and in 1959 she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. This reissued selection brings the finest of her poetry to a new generation of readers. This selection is introduced by Dr Jane Dowson, Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature at De Montfort University, whose publications include The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women’s Poetry (CUP, 2011). It includes a memoir written by Dr...

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...

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;...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This anthology is a celebration of the city of London: 'Noisy, stimulating, deadening, filthy, mysterious, tolerant, racist, crime-ridden, saint-haunted, ancient, up-to-the-minute, oppressive, liberating, crowded, lonely, addictive, and green-and-gardened, London is a microcosm of the World.' These words, from Anna Adams' Foreword, give a taste of the breadth of subject-matter and tone to be enjoyed in this magnificent illustrated anthology. Writing from the Middle Ages to the present is divided into themes including 'The Weather in the Streets', 'The Poor and the Rich', 'The Countryman in Town', 'The Recent Wars' and - unavoidably - 'London Transport'. Writers include: Anna Adams, W.H.Auden, William...

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...

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...

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...

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.

"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.

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

Light Unlocked consists of poems sent by their authors, many of them well-known contemporary writers, as Christmas cards. It begins with Advent and ends with songs at the year's turning and Epiphany. While a good number of the poems attend to the nativity, others also encompass the natural world, weather and the time passing. Hardbound and filled with festive engravings by John Lawrence Light Unlocked is, above all, a celebration of festivity. It is therefore a fantastic choice for a Christmas gift. Edited by Lawrence Sail & Kevin Crossley-Holland. 'This is one of the most delightful anthologies to be published in years. It's beautifully illustrated...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

In 1806 twelve-year old Hannah embroiders the sampler of the long title poem. As the seasons pass, she works through her grief in the language of embroidery; for among the births and deaths recorded in Hannah's stitches are those of her little brother Nathan. American Sampler is about vanishing worlds and the struggle of memory, craft and imagination to hold fragments of the pass and turn them into fresh, breathing moments. Jane Duran's childhood memories of rural New England, its landscapes weather and light, permeate many of the poems. A beaded moccasin, a folk painting, a letter from a Union...