Description: Drawing of a butterfly and tile featuring St Jude from a 16th century ceramic stove from the Museum of London Collection. Medium: Coloured pencil on paper Image Size: 30.5cm x 22.9cm Frame Size: 40cm x 30cm

Description: 6th Century BC Greek jug with flowers Medium: Coloured pencil on paper Image Size: 30.5cm x 22.9cm Frame Size: 40cm x 30cm

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...

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...

A legendary figure among the ‘Auden generation’ of young writers in the 1930s, Edward Upward continued writing into his late nineties. This new selection of his best short stories spans a literary career of almost eight decades, and was published to celebrate his centenary in 2003. Beginning in 1928 with the fantastical world of Mortmere in The Railway Accident, the stories continue through the era of political engagement in the Thirties to the reflective and poignant studies of old age that have underpinned his revival in the past decade. Together they represent a lifetime of achievement in modern literature.  

One of 6 hardback copies signed by Upward on his 100th birthday   A legendary figure among the ‘Auden generation’ of young writers in the 1930s, Edward Upward continued writing into his late nineties. This selection of his best short stories spans a literary career of almost eight decades, and was published to celebrate his centenary in 2003. Beginning in 1928 with the fantastical world of Mortmere in The Railway Accident, the stories continue through the era of political engagement in the Thirties to the reflective and poignant studies of old age that have underpinned his revival in the past decade. Together...

David Gascoyne's classic text of 1935 was the first comprehensive work on Surrealism to be published in English. His membership of the Surrealist movement and his association with its leading members - among them André Breton, Paul Eduard, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí - placed him in the ideal position to witness and record the development and significance of its foremost writers and artists. David Gascoyne lived in France in 1937-39, 1947-8 and 1953-64, during which time he became one of the most distinguished of British poets and translators. His other Enitharmon books include Selected Poems, Selected Verse Translations, Selected...

Denton Welch, one of the most gifted creative artists of his generation, died in 1948 at the age of thirty-one, leaving this, perhaps his finest work, almost but not quite completed. Under the thin disguise of fiction Denton Welch recreates the world of hospitals and nursing homes in which he spent so many months after the accident which was eventually to prove fatal to him. The details of daily routine, the fellow patients, the nurses and doctors, the comedies and tragedies which loom so large in the confined existence of the sick, all are described so vividly, with so much...

Alan Clodd and the Enitharmon Press is a bibliography of works published under Clodd's Directorship.   Clodd was a bibliophile in the purest sense of the word. His personal collection was vast, and above all, his dedication to publishing high quality poetry books was second to none.

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...

An Unmentionable Man is a collection of short stories. The first four of these short stories by Edward Upward, form a closely linked sequence - almost a single story - and could be described as 'realistic dreams'. They are vivid and often satirical, the product of long experience, but are neither cynical nor finally pessimistic. In certain inherited ways they resemble Upward's earlier fantasies 'The Railway Accident' and Journey to the Border, both published by Enitharmon. Of the last two stories, 'Fred and Lil' is straightforwardly realistic and humbly sympathetic, while 'With Alan to the Fair' deals with love, hate and political extremism in...

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...

An Epistle highlighting the relationship of Gascoyne and Ginsberg. This letter, written by David Gascoyne in 1986 as a contribution to a festschrift for his friend and fellow poet Allen Ginsberg was published in America that year. It was unknown in the UK when Roger Scott edited Gascoyne’s Selected Prose 1934-1996 and for some years afterwards. Published to mark Gascoyne’s centenary in October 2016, it is an important document illuminating what was always a grey area in his biography: the visit Gascoyne made with Kathleen Raine and W. S. Graham to the USA in the autumn of 1951. Following in the footsteps of Dylan...

At the Yeoman's House When in 1947 the young writer Ronald Blythe first visited Bottengoms Farm on the Essex-Suffolk border, the ancient house of the artists John and Christine Nash, he could not have guessed that this would in time become his own home and the centre of his writing life. From his current perspective, Blythe looks back with affection to the friendships with artists, writers, farmers, gardeners and neighbours that were to enrich his life. At the Yeoman’s House is not merely a spellbinding fragment of autobiography, but also a fascinating picture of the history, topography, botany and folk-lore of...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

Caroline Walker writes: ‘Early Years brings my interest in nurseries as a subject for painting into the language of printmaking with my first set of etchings since experimenting with the medium during my MA at the Royal College of Art (2007-2009). “Early Years” is a term used to describe children’s developmental provision in the years before they start school. It’s a period in which young children learn about the world around them – how to feed and dress themselves, speak and understand language and build relationships with others. Each etching depicts a scene of nurture with a pared-back palette of...

'Slavery, in different forms, in different places, in different times links these photographs. In 1997, when I took the photograph of the garbage-collecting children in Karachi, I was not thinking of them as slaves, I was thinking of them as part of a process where waste is re-cycled, plastics, metals collected, sorted, melted down, transformed, re-used. A good thing. Only later did I start to think about whether they had any choice in the matter, if they had other realistic options in order to survive, whether they were physically intimidated into doing what they do. I don't really know the answer,...

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...

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....