Poetry

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...

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.'  

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...

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...

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.  

Into the Woods takes us to imaginary wild woodland in the centre of London. In this story the woodsman, the wild girl and the widow Mary live in a recognisable present, but being archetypes, they continually try to emerge from our time into one that may never have been – the Lambeth woods. We too are drawn into our own fantasies of wild woods from folk tales, and here real-life images of Epping Forest and Box Hill fuel our imagination and work to plunge us, resisting, into the centre of the woods, into heterotopia. In the end though, we emerge...

Anna Robinson's first full collection, The Finders of London, introduces a compelling new voice in poetry. Her poems, set in and around the centre of London, depict a capital both familiar and alien, peopled with figures contemporary and historical: from the residents of present-day Lambeth, to the victims of Jack the Ripper, and to those whose spirits are still embedded in the reflections of a plate-glass office window, in the earth beneath the author’s feet, or in the flotsam washed up on the Thames beach. It’s these working-class voices that lend strength to Robinson’s own, and with it she mythologizes,...

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...

Songs of the Darkness brings together a selection of poems for Christmas written over a period of more than thirty years. They are notable for their combination of a close focus and breadth, and for the way in which the seasonal is celebrated alongside the challenges of history and the beauty of the natural world. Trees, flowers, creatures and landscapes are set memorably in the context of the Christmas story and the calendar: and topographically the poems range from a Romanian convent to a Devon beach to an alpine cablecar.  

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...

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...

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...