Poetry

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...

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.

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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.  

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...

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 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.  

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.  

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.  

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...

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)...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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.