Poetry

As a young girl, Jane Duran moved to Chile with her family, travelling from New York to Valparaiso on the Santa Barbara, one of the Grace Line fleet. This long journey, passing through the Panama Canal and down the Pacific coast of Latin America, has inspired her collection of poems Graceline. These meditative poems cross over continually between illusion and reality, past and present. Although they evoke the journey, and the extraordinary landscapes of Chile, they also explore darker undercurrents. Her sequence Panama Canal evokes the terrors of the Canal’s construction; a sequence on the regime of Pinochet (Invisible Ink)...

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 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...

Letters Against the Firmament is a user’s report on the end of the world, a treatise against Tory terror, a proposal for a new zodiac, a defence of poetry, a hex against the devourers of planet earth. The Letters are fierce epistolary poems, a vivid account of the sheer panic and brutality of the Austerity years. They are apocalyptic screeds of black humour hammered out in an obscure corner of east London, fearful attempts to ward off the attentions of gentrifiers, bailiffs, border agents and racists. In this collection in four parts they are joined by lean versions of already well-known...

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.

Inspired by and devoted to absent friends, this selection of poems from 1989 onwards shows Duffy at her bravest and most colourful, a consummate performer who transits without a jolt from Venice to the Underworld, from war-torn elegy to aesthetics. Though the grand theme is that of memorial and resignation, the verse is full of Gaelic wit and linguistic trickery. Amongst many highlights, ‘Lament for the Scribblers’ is a clarion call to failing poets, while the concluding four-part masterpiece, ‘In Novia Scotia’, delicately negotiates the mingled threat and fertility of the ocean.  

U. A. Fanthorpe and R. V. Bailey write: ‘Wordsworth speaks of the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. This seems an apt description of these love poems. They are not important resonant pieces of writing: they simply happened when one of us felt like writing to the other, quite often when one of us was away from home. Some of them coincided with Valentine's Days or birthdays, but that was more a matter of good luck than foresight. Quakers, rightly, maintain that Christmas Day is only one important day of all the 365 important days of the year. It's the same with...

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...

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....

These 81 brief poems from the 5th century BCE make up a foundational text in world culture. In elegant, simple yet elusive language, the Daodejing develops its vision of humankind’s place in the world in personal, moral, social, political and cosmic terms. Martyn Crucefix’s superb new versions in English reflect – for the very first time – the radical fluidity of the original Chinese texts as well as placing the mysterious ‘dark’ feminine power at their heart. Laozi, the putative author, is said to have despaired of the world’s venality and corruption, but he was persuaded to leave the Daodejing poems...

Derelict Air Included are more than 400 pages of previously uncollected poetry, from Dorn’s first Beat poems in 1952 to translations of native texts from the Mayans and Aztecs. The transatlantic roots of Dorn’s anti-capitalism are fully visible. Robert Creeley wrote that “No poet has been more painfully, movingly, political”. Any reader interested in post-War American modernism must have Edward Dorn’s poetry, complete with scholarly endnotes, manuscript facsimiles, and a cover by the painter Raymond Obermayr.   THE SCREWBALL There’s my guy on patrol, janglin keys, chains rings upon all his fingers studs scattered like imps Bellbottoms (Feb. 1996) He’s not pierced yet...

Shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize for best first collection The Arctic has long been a place of encounters, and Disko Bay is a meeting point for whalers and missionaries, scientists and shamans. These poems relate the struggle for existence in the harsh polar environment, and address tensions between modern life and traditional ways of subsistence. As the environment begins to change, hunters grow hungry and their languages are lost. The final sequence, Jutland, moves the reader to the northern fringes of Europe, where shifting waterlines bear witness to the disappearing arctic ice.   Nakuarsuuvoq / The night hunter I am a poet. I am...

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...

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.  

Centred on environments – human, insect and animal – some experienced personally, some observed, some imagined. Though strictly contemporary in her concerns, she reaches back in her poetry to childhood, and beyond that in her imagination to cultural figures of the past – John Donne, Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, bringing them lucidly and vividly to life.  

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...

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...

Berowne’s Book This book was written before Fanthorpe made her reputation as one of England’s most popular contemporary poets. "In 1974, having found that the way to get a job was to conceal my qualifications," she wrote, "I contrived to be taken on as a clerk/receptionist in a small hospital." "Poetry" she said, "struck during my first month behind the desk." Her observations are accompanied here by some of her very earliest poems. These are hilarious, tender, profound and deeply humane. This series of snapshots of hospital life in the 1970s shocks partly because so much is immediately familiar today.

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...

Christmas Poems U.A. Fanthorpe's collection gathers together the poems she wrote and sent to friends as Christmas cards from 1974 to 2002. Now readers can enjoy Fanthorpe's yearly output in its entirety. Her subject matter covers a broad range of seasonal characters, from angels to personified Christmas trees, as well as a variety of styles to match, from moments of beautiful lyricism to the comically touching Gloucestershire foxes begging baby Jesus to visit: 'Come live wi we under Westridge / Where the huntin folk be few'. Fanthorpe is witty and highly original, rethinking the Nativity from quirky angles. She creates her...