Poetry

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,...

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...

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...

Still is a sequence of poems in response to panoramic photographs of battlefields associated with the Battle of the Somme. Chosen from archives at Imperial War Museum, these astonishingly clear photographic images are ahead of their time. Still was published on the centenary of the battle, which is considered to be one of the bloodiest in British military history. Appropriately and impressively, Armitage's thirty poems are versions of the infamously tense Georgics by the Roman poet Virgil. The contemporary words meld with the visual devastations of war to haunting effect. Designed by Praline Design Studio and published by Enitharmon Press and the Imperial War Museums,...

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...

The Breaking Hour is a book of meetings. A mother meets her baby. A man steps into his childhood. An old man encounters Godfather Death. And in the persona of Harald Hardrada, a passionate man wrestles with his fantasies, and north meets south. The Breaking Hour invokes Orpheus and Atargatis, Pierre de Ronsard and Beethoven, and moving from Hades to a hellish warzone, the high Alps and Crossley-Holland's own beloved north Norfolk.

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...

The Exeter Book Riddles The ninety-six Anglo-Saxon riddles in the eleventh-century Exeter Book are poems of great charm, zest, and subtlety. This volume contains Crossley-Holland’s translations of seventy-five fascinating and discursive riddles, while a further sixteen are also translated in the notes. These translations are widely anthologised in Britain and the USA. Sir Arthur Bliss and William Mathias set some of them to music. In addition, Ralph Steadman has illustrated them and Michael Fairfax has incorporated them in his Riddle Sculpture. They are full of sharp observation, earthy humour and above all - a sense of wonder.  

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...

Work From All Major Volumes Selections range from Clemo's The Clay Verge in 1951 to 1995’s The Cured Arno. Landscape poems full of pain give way to monologues, biographical sketches, broader themes and looser forms. The settings of white tips, flooded pits and the grinding works of the industrial-rural clayscape are replaced by the rivers and bridges of Florence and Venice and the coastal ease of Dorset. However, as Rowan Williams states in his introduction, ‘mellow is not the word’ for this transformation.  

Selected Poems by U. A. Fanthorpe U.A. Fanthorpe was that rarest of literary beings - a poet who was hugely popular with the general public and at the same time very seriously regarded by fellow poets and literary critics for her originality, wit and humanity. Since her death, much of her work has been out of print. Selected Poems is chosen from over thirty years of Fanthorpe’s distinctive and accessible writing by her partner R.V. Bailey. It will delight all her existing fans as well as those who come to her poems for the first time.  

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...

Deceptively relaxed in tone, these verse letters – sometime serious, sometimes whimsical – are addressed to people who, for various reasons, have been of importance in Neil Curry’s life. Ranging from Angela Carter to the Venerable Bede and from Odysseus to Gilbert White’s tortoise, they cover topics as diverse as smallpox and the paintings of Vermeer, landscape gardening, the King James Bible and Eddie Stobart’s lorries on the M6. There has not been a collection of verse letters of this nature since the Epistles of the Roman poet Horace and, fittingly, it is to Horace that the final letter is...

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...

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.  

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.'  

Stanza Stones The Stanza Stones Trail runs through the Pennine region, containing some of the most striking landscapes in England. Simon Armitage composed six new poems on his Pennine walks. With the help of local expert Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver Pip Hall, he found extraordinary, secluded sites, and saw his words carved into stone. This book is a record of that journey, containing the poems and the accounts of Lonsdale and Hall. Covered in decades of soot and grime, the colours released by the carvings may never return to shades of black. Hence, they become a small reminder of the changes that...

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.

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.  

This book gathers together three important poems by Simon Armitage written for film or radio. Out of the Blue is an award-winning poem-film created after the attacks on the twin towers, told from the point of view of an English trader working in the North Tower of the World Trade Centre. With a title from a Churchill speech ‘We May Allow Ourselves a Brief Period of Rejoicing’,  Rejoicing is a Channel 5 commission broadcast on the 60th anniversary of VE Day. Additionally, ‘Cambodia’ comes from the radio drama The Violence of Silence set 30 years after the Khmer Rouge.

For Maureen Duffy, pictures are magical creations and recreations – of history, mythologies, landscape, love and death – where artists take risks analogous to a poet’s with words. Pictures abound in this collection, ushering the reader from canvas to screen via x-rays and iPhone snapshots, the latter inspiring the closing sequence Burdsong. Above all, Pictures from an Exhibition celebrates the mind’s eye, which is its own exhibition gallery: transforming Darlington Station into an upturned ship’s hull or a mauled pigeon into a still life, and glorying in the lives, loves and creations of painters from Veronese to Anselm Kiefer.   BLACK ON...

‘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  

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.

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...