{"title":"Book","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"how-the-bicycle-shone","title":"How the Bicycle Shone","description":"\u003cp\u003eDenise Levertov described Allnutt's poems as 'at once hard and delicate, like wrought iron'. They are both serious and light in touch, deeply humane and spiritually profound, showing the spirit surviving amongst the tatters of Christianity in a modern wilderness. \"How the Bicycle Shone\" includes selections from her books \"Spitting the Pips Out\" (1981), \"Beginning the Avocado\" (1987), \"Blackthorn\" (1994) and \"Nantucket and the Angel\" (1997), as well as the whole of \"Lintel\" (2001), \"Sojourner\" (2004) and a collection of new poems, \"Wolflight\" (2007).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bloodaxe Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":23856442567,"sku":"9781852247591","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/product_9781852247591.jpg?v=1467234916"},{"product_id":"beauty-beauty","title":"Beauty\/Beauty by Rebecca Perry","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eShortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe world of\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eBeauty\/Beauty\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eis ‘built from the nose\/out, like a painting’, accumulating its various feelings, ideas, objects, disappointments and joys to the point of almost overflowing. Preoccupied with demise and loss, as well as reimagination and regeneration, Rebecca Perry’s debut collection has the duality and symmetry of its title at its core.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eBeauty\/Beauty\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eis a book with tenderness running through its veins, exploring salvation, reparation and the fullness of being alive; the difficulty of defining what love is, the heartbreak, the faraway friends, the overwhelming abundance of things in museums. It is alive with memories, with old loves hanging around in the corners of dark rooms, ghost mouths hidden inside the mouth you are kissing, and eulogies to dearly departed pets.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEach poem creates its own tiny world to be lived in and explored; a stegosaurus is adored, a million silver spiders play dead, a list of flowers is not really a list of flowers, adorable dogs want to be friends, the flightless grow wings, and the stars turn green.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘…some of the most interesting names on the shortlist [for the T S Eliot Prize 2015] are the newest ones: Rebecca Perry and Sarah Howe have both been nominated for their debut collections. Perry’s\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eBeauty\/Beauty\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eis a book of reflection and symmetry, with several of the poems spaced to look like mirror images of each other. Interested in the ways that languages express love, she is on a quest to view emotion from all possible angles.’ – Charlotte Runcie,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eDaily Telegraph\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘In\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eBeauty\/Beauty\u003c\/em\u003e, she offers female perspectives with openness and vulnerability, in both her themes and experiments with form, to find new ways of writing the feminine. Non-linear images are subverted by shattered narratives, in poems written \"from the nose \/ out, like a painting\". Her gaze is not limited to personal experience. It is a triumph of imagination that she is able to empathise with other forms of oppression, such as the killing of Bigfoot and a slave on a slave ship. She captures the sadness of seas and writes a love poem to a stegosaurus, whose mouth \"holds more wonder than a sky full of stars\".’ – Pascale Petit, chair of the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize judges\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘All of the poems in this debut, shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, search for the impossible-to-find… Perry has a chatty, sometimes superficial tone that belies her wry wisdom.’ – Evan Jones,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eGuardian\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘’”I will be electric in the sweet world”, Rebecca Perry promises near the beginning of\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eBeauty\/Beauty\u003c\/em\u003e, her first full-length collection. The promise is upheld from beginning to end of this arresting book.’ – Leaf Arbuthnot,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'Richly self-reliant, these are poems for the girl-power generation. In a world where all is relative, subjective and ironic, their breakages and weaknesses and contradictions get as close to something like sincerity as most young poets dare.' – Kate Bingham, \u003ci\u003ePoetry Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘A mural of tiles, each etched carefully with the different, daily eyes, hearts, fins and scales of ghostly others –\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eBeauty\/Beauty\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eis an unmissable and energetic collection.’ – Lucy Mercer,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eOxford Poetry\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ciframe width=\"280\" height=\"157\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/P8DK71bKXkA\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\"\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e","brand":"Bloodaxe Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":23858765383,"sku":"9781780371450","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/554b475da9f5d.jpg?v=1502269442"},{"product_id":"otherwise-4","title":"Otherwise by John Dennison","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eShortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe poems in this first collection by New Zealand poet John Dennison are concerned, above all, with love, and with the strange, unlooked-for manner of its appearances among us. Marked by emotional acuity and formal deftness, Otherwise draws us into confrontations with our equivocal and finite nature. The book includes, among other elegies, a moving sequence for Seamus Heaney. Here too, because 'some things bear repeating', are moments of turning, of grace and our refusals. This is a moving and thought-provoking collection from an assured new voice.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Carcanet Press Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":23986609671,"sku":"9781847774996","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/Dennison_Otherwise_Mock.jpg?v=1502269933"},{"product_id":"observances","title":"The Observances by Kate Miller","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eShortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the informal rituals of the tide remaking its tideline, of a painter absorbed in the act of painting or of an old couple greeting the night, the English poet Kate Miller sees and charts the creative process at work. As its title suggests, Miller's striking debut collection explores perception, the poet's eye and ear trained on distances that stretch beyond comfort zones. This is a book full of movement: even quiet reflections on home and family life are rarely still. Throughout the collection Miller dwells on the unfixed and restless image and shows herself as subject to it - to the difficult illusion of physical energy in sculpture, to the changeability of skies and the insistent rhythm and presence of the sea.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Carcanet Press Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":23990999687,"sku":"9781906188153","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/Miller_Kate_Observances.jpg?v=1502269962"},{"product_id":"measures-of-expatriation","title":"Measures of Expatriation","description":"'Expatriation: my having had a patria, a fatherland, to leave, did not occur to me until I was forced to invent one. [...] This luxury of inattention, invention, and final mismatch...a 'Trinidad' being created that did not take my Trinidad away (my Trinidad takes itself away, in reality, over time)...that is expatriation, no? An exile, a migrant, a refugee, would have been in more of a hurry, would have been more driven out or driven towards, would have been seeking and finding not.'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003cem\u003eMeasures of Expatriation\u003c\/em\u003e Vahni Capildeo's poems and prose-poems speak of the complex alienation of the expatriate, and address wider issues around identity in contemporary Western society. Born in Trinidad and resident in the UK, Capildeo rejects the easy depiction of a person as a neat, coherent whole - 'pure is a strange word' -embracing instead a pointilliste self, one grounded in complexity. In these texts sense and syntax are disrupted; languages rub and intersect; dream sequences, love poems, polylogues and borrowed words build into a precarious self-assemblage. 'Cliche', she writes, 'is spitting into the sea', and in this book poetry is still a place where words and names, with their power to bewitch and subjugate, may be disrupted, reclaimed. The politics of the body, and cultures of sexual objectification, gender inequality and casual racism, are the borders across which Capildeo homes, seeking the modest luxury of being 'looked at as if one is neutral ground'. In the end it is language itself, the determination to speak, to which the poet finds she belongs: 'Language is my home, I say; not one particular language.' \u003cem\u003eMeasures of Expatriation\u003c\/em\u003e is in the vanguard of literature arising from the aftermath of Empire, with a fearless and natural complexity.","brand":"Carcanet Press Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":24007348295,"sku":"9781784101688","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/product_9781784101688.jpg?v=1467390314"},{"product_id":"the-blind-roadmaker","title":"The Blind Road-Maker","description":"If the starting point for a number of poems in Ian Duhig's richly varied new collection is Sterne's \u003cem\u003eTristram Shandy\u003c\/em\u003e, its presiding genius is the great eighteenth-century civil engineer, fiddler and polymath Blind Jack Metcalf - whose life Duhig here celebrates, and from whose example he draws great inspiration. Writing with an almost Burnsian eclecticism, Duhig explores urban poverty, determinism, social justice and the consolations of poetry and music on a journey that takes in everything from a riotous reimagining of Don Juan to the tragedy of Manuel Bravo (the Leeds asylum seeker from Angola who was forced to defend himself in court, and later took his own life). No poet today writes with such a sense of political and social conscience, and \u003cem\u003eThe Blind Roadmaker \u003c\/em\u003eaffirms Duhig's belief in poetry as a means of commemorating those who least deserve to be forgotten.","brand":"Picador","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":24007354183,"sku":"9781509809813","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/product_9781509809813.jpg?v=1467390318"},{"product_id":"interference-pattern","title":"Interference Pattern","description":"At first, these extraordinary poems may unsettle and disturb, but the next reading could be one of rapture and astonishment; it all hinges on your point of view. Like the optical illusion of the maiden and the crone, you can only see one image at a time; the brain deciding which is the figure and which the background. It is a book that acts out its own subjects – dualities, ambiguities, boundaries – through physical dislocation, through patterns of interference.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is a collage of many voices: eager or dispassionate, unreliable or matter-of-fact – depending, as with everything else, on your angle of entry. Some of the voices fear involvement; some are afraid of doing nothing; some, perhaps, have already gone too far. Like the image on the cover, these pieces shimmer and buzz in their own instability. Is this punishment or reward? What is the yellow smoke? Will there be bodies floating under the plastic pool-cover? Are we, like the hotel manager, seeing visions?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVolatile, troubling, but endlessly interesting, these poems show J. O. Morgan working and compressing language into a precarious, frictional state. As a result, \u003cem\u003eInterference Pattern \u003c\/em\u003eis a unique reading experience: vivid, challenging and completely original.","brand":"Jonathan Cape Ltd.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":24007362823,"sku":"9781910702024","price":10.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/product_9781910702024.jpg?v=1467390326"},{"product_id":"this-changes-things","title":"This Changes Things by Claire Askew","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eShortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cspan\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThis changes things\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eis Claire Askew’s first full collection, coming after years of work in Scotland’s flourishing poetry and spoken word scene.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHer poems focus on the lives and experiences of women – particularly the socially or economically marginalised – at pains both to empathise and to recognise the limits of this empathy. They embody a need to acknowledge and challenge the poet’s privileged position as documenter and outsider, a responsibility to the poem’s political message and to that message’s human subject.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThis changes things\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003edraws much of its strength from this exploration of inbetweenness. Claire Askew’s purposeful deployment of objects, lighting effects and liminal spaces implicates her reader in the poem’s argument, holds up a mirror and asks us to pay attention. The book’s romantic relationships, depictions of frustrated travel or social mobility, are bound up in its awareness of the systems of power that permit no true state of innocence. Even the final poem, ‘Hydra’ – with its celebration of the body and its senses – cannot ultimately allow us off the hook.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThis changes things\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eunsettles the homely and recognisable. In its compromised, imperfect characters and narratives, it proposes a radical way of translating neoliberal Britain.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eClaire Askew was runner-up for the inaugural Edwin Morgan Poetry Award in 2014 for an earlier version of\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThis changes things\u003c\/em\u003e. The judges’ comments included:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStewart Conn: ‘Claire Askew’s voice is arrestingly and distinctively her own, imbued with a sense of caring and inducing, in her more intimate moments, a scarcely bearable poignancy.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJen Hadfield: ‘Askew’s is a humane consciousness, with a genius for communicating how people tick… She writes with an agenda compellingly, harnessing flashes of imagist brilliance.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘Claire Askew doesn’t mince words: she revels in them, pretty or dirty, and hammers them into strange and kenspeckle amulets, talismans against loss, death, isolation…. Looking into the future with ‘no innocence’, haunted by the past, the allusive, mysterious work at the core of this collection will take Claire Askew far.’ – Pippa Little,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Lake\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e'This changes things\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eis, admirably, a feminist collection - deeply concerned with women's lives, in all their strength and vulnerability.  But Askew has a capacious eye; in the slow-burning second half of the book... some strong poems documenting travel... suggest a poet whose next steps are attractively difficult to predict... Askew is the real thing, and everyone should buy this debut.' - Kathryn Gray,\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eMagma\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘…an excellent debut from a promising new voice in Scottish poetry.’ – Leaf Arbuthnot,\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘I adored William Letford's raw and intimate second collection,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eDirt,\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eas well as Claire Askew's heart-twisting debut,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThis Changes Things\u003c\/em\u003e.’ – Kirsty Logan,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Herald\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e(Books of the Year 2016)\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bloodaxe Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":24007368327,"sku":"9781780372761","price":9.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/this_changes_things.jpg?v=1502268684"},{"product_id":"hunting-the-boar","title":"Hunting the Boar","description":"\u003ch4\u003ePBS Recommendation - Summer 2016\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\n\u003c\/h4\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e    Interrogation, the routine\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e      humiliation – stifled cries\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e      like sex, like birth: expulsed from\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e      (some concertina-wired town)\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e      like the bodies she sees\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e      on the world’s front page\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e      dumped like dirty clothes\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e      in front of the machine.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e‘I want this to happen in a second \/ on the page,’ Brahic writes in ‘Stations in the Metro’. ‘But the mind keeeps thinking other things.’ Poised and intimately crafted, Brahic’s poems flicker restlessly in their attention to everything – history, memories, food, desire – that \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003eis \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003ethe present moment.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBeverley Bie Brahic is a prize-winning translator of Apollinaire, Yves Bonnefoy and Francis Ponge. Her previous collection, \u003ci\u003eWhite Sheets\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize:\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e'A book of craft, music and a collected vision of life that provides pleasure on every page.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e     – Eavan Boland\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e‘Perhaps partly because of Brahic’s translation work, there’s a sense of joy in language . . .\u003ci\u003eWhite Sheets\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is immensely readable, skilfully crafted and rich with ideas and feeling.’\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e     – Katherine Stansfield, \u003cem\u003eMagma\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e‘Brahic writes with singular, and non-sentimental, brilliance.’\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"BasicParagraph\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e     – Ian Pople, \u003ci\u003eManchester Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"CB editions","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":27960378631,"sku":"9780909585188","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/CB_Editions_-_Hunting_the_Boar.png?v=1477648824"},{"product_id":"to-fold-the-evening-star-new-selected-poems-by-ian-mcmillan","title":"To Fold the Evening Star: New \u0026 Selected Poems by Ian McMillan","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003ch4\u003ePBS Recommendation - Summer 2016\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e  \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\n\u003c\/h4\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cem\u003eApril is the Cruellest Month\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cem\u003emight seem like a strange name for a dog,\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cem\u003eand sometimes I think it is\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cem\u003ewhen I’m shouting her name\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cem\u003eon the high moors\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cem\u003ein the driving wind . . .\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003efrom ‘My Dog’\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cem\u003e \u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003eIan McMillan is among Britain’s most treasured living poets. 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If they made him Poet Laureate on Friday, a lot more people would be reading poetry by Monday.’ \u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGuardian\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cem\u003e‘An inspiring figure, an encouraging \u0026amp; democratic spirit, a strong \u0026amp; popular poet and one of the funniest people in Britain.’ \u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePoetry News\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cem\u003e‘The verbal gymnastics of a north country Spike Milligan coupled with the comic timing of Eric Morecambe.’\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFrome Festival\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cem\u003e \u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cem\u003e‘The John Peel of poetry.’\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAlec Finlay\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Carcanet Press Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":27961089095,"sku":"9781784101886","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/s-l1600.jpg?v=1471611847"},{"product_id":"no-map-could-show-them","title":"No Map Could Show Them","description":"\u003ch4\u003ePBS Recommendation - Summer 2016\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e  \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\n\u003c\/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e'When we climb alone\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003een cordée feminine,\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003ewe are magicians of the Alps –\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003ewe make the routes we follow\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003edisappear'\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe poems of Helen Mort's second collection offer an unforgettable perspective on the heights we scale and the distances we run, the routes we follow and the paths we make for ourselves.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere are odes to the women who dared to break new ground – from Miss Jemima Morrell, a young Victorian woman from Yorkshire who hiked the Swiss Peaks in her skirts and petticoats, to the modern British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, who died descending from the summit of K2.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDistinctive and courageous, these are poems of passion and precipices, of edges and extremes. \u003ci\u003eNo Map Could Show Them\u003c\/i\u003e confirms Helen Mort’s position as one of the finest young poets at work today.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Chatto \u0026 Windus","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":27961731591,"sku":"9781784740641","price":10.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/51a-isZSezL.jpg?v=1471613109"},{"product_id":"the-months","title":"The Months","description":"\u003ch4\u003ePBS Recommendation - Summer 2016\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e  \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\n\u003c\/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Months\u003c\/i\u003e is a book of poems about time – not only the attritions of time, its ageings, conflicts and illnesses, but also, and more importantly, the kind of time the French philosopher Bergson called ‘duration’, a human time that speeds up or slows, expands and contracts, measured by perceptual rather than scientific laws.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt the centre of the collection, the long title-poem interweaves material from two pregnancies spanning two generations: these months open themselves up to insecurities and dreams, culture, myths, everyday realities and moments of fear or delight. The two births that end this compelling narrative take the book in a new direction, to a time and place where it is possible to stand still and watch a saucepan drying on a draining-board or cycle round a mountainous island at age sixty, laugh at oneself, or even begin again.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'Wicks can be both a fearless and arrestingly tender kind of writer, unafraid of taking a thought into uncomfortable, raw or unexpected places... confessions and punishments, banishments and betrayals, all are rendered in the mouths of the past or looked at from the aftermath of the present. 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Or so frighteningly.’ – Alan Brownjohn, \u003ci\u003eSunday Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bloodaxe Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":27961785863,"sku":"9781780372907","price":9.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/55ca044e75496.jpg?v=1471613283"},{"product_id":"selected-poems-by-jamie-mckendrick","title":"Selected Poems by Jamie McKendrick","description":"\u003ch4\u003ePBS Special Commendation - Summer 2016\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e  \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\n\u003c\/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDrawn from thirty years of work, this selection, made by the poet himself, gathers from the best of Jamie McKendrick's six acclaimed collections, including some translations, from 1991's debut \u003ci\u003eThe Sirocco Room\u003c\/i\u003eto \u003ci\u003eOut There\u003c\/i\u003e (2012, and winner of the Hawthornden Prize) by way of \u003ci\u003eThe Marble Fly \u003c\/i\u003e(1997), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and \u003ci\u003eInk Stone\u003c\/i\u003e, shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2003. \u003ci\u003eSky Nails\u003c\/i\u003e, his selected poems, was published by Faber in 2000, and selections of his poems have been translated and published in Holland and in Italy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThroughout, McKendrick has been concerned with the charting of space, of the distances between homeland and edgeland, the far-flung and the near-at-hand, the past and present, the familiar and the strange in poems which cast a sharp eye over their subject matter and return with wry, unsettling observations. 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It also includes work by more recent poets such as Colm Breathnach, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, Micheál Ó Cuaig and Áine Ní Ghlinn.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe anthology has translations by some of Ireland’s most distinguished poets and translators, including Valentine Iremonger, Michael Hartnett, Paul Muldoon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Bernard O’Donoghue, Maurice Riordan, Peter Sirr, David Wheatley and Mary O’Donoghue, most of them newly commissioned for this project. Many of the poems, including Eoghan Ó Tuairisc’s anguished response to the bombing of Hiroshima, ‘Aifreann na marbh’ [Mass for the dead] have not previously been available in English.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn addition to presenting some of the best poetry in Irish written since 1900, the anthology challenges the extent to which writing in Irish has been underrepresented in collections of modern and contemporary Irish poetry. In his introduction and notes, Louis de Paor argues that Irish language poetry should be evaluated according to its own rigorous aesthetic rather than as a subsidiary of the dominant Anglophone tradition of Irish writing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eCo-published with Cló Iar-Chonnacht \u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘Every so often... a book arrives which shows the possibility of reconsidering and reconceiving the way poetry works in Ireland:\u003cem\u003e Leabhar Na hAthghabhála: Poems of Repossession\u003c\/em\u003e (Cló Iar-Chonnacht\/Bloodaxe) is one of those books… This is a terrific, open introduction to a century of Irish-language poetry and its connections and conjunctions animate the debates and breakthroughs and experiments, successful and otherwise, that comprise our living tradition.’ – John McAuliffe\u003cem\u003e, Irish Times\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘One of the fascinating aspects of this anthology is to note the cross currents and influences that have shaped the poetry included in it and to see how a legitimate desire to preserve one’s roots does not necessarily cut one off from the wider world.’ – David Cooke, \u003cem\u003eThe Manchester Review\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bloodaxe Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":27963424839,"sku":"9781780372990","price":30.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/55ca02e4a7f58.jpg?v=1471615443"},{"product_id":"lunarium","title":"Lunarium","description":"\u003cspan\u003eIn 2008 this book, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ccite\u003eLlunari (Lunarium)\u003c\/cite\u003e\u003cspan\u003e was the winner of the Prize Jocs Florals de Barcelona and Josep Lluís Aguiló was appointed Poet Laureate of the City of Barcelona during the period 2008-2009. It takes up once more the theme of the uncertainty of life, and in omens and elements of fantasy (labyrinths, hells, guardians, palaces with golden pillars, apocalypses), the poet reveals allegories of our everyday universe.\u003c\/span\u003e","brand":"Arc Publications","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":27963625095,"sku":"9781910345467","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/bg_Lunarium.jpg?v=1471615691"},{"product_id":"gate-of-lilacs","title":"Gate of Lilacs","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"col-xs-12\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"panel panel-default\" itemprop=\"description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOver a period of fifteen years Clive James learned French by almost no other method than reading \u003ci\u003eÀ \u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003ela recherche du temps perdu\u003c\/i\u003e. Then he spent half a century trying to get up to speed with Proust's great novel in two different languages. \u003ci\u003eGate of Lilacs\u003c\/i\u003eis the unique product of James's love and engagement with Proust's eternal masterpiece.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith \u003ci\u003eÀ \u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003ela recherche du temps perdu\u003c\/i\u003e, Proust, in James's words, 'followed his creative instinct all the way until his breath gave out', and now James has done the same. In \u003ci\u003eGate of Lilacs\u003c\/i\u003e, James, a brilliant critical essayist and poet, has blended the two forms into one.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eI had always thought the critical essay and the poem were closely related forms . . . If I wanted to talk about Proust's poetry beyond the basic level of talking about his language - if I wanted to talk about the poetry of his thought - then the best way to do it might be to write a poem.There is nothing like a poem for transmitting a mental flavour. Instead of trying to describe it, you can evoke it.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the end, if \u003ci\u003eÀ \u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003ela recherche du temps perdu\u003c\/i\u003e is a book devoted almost entirely to its author's gratitude for life, for love, and for art, this much smaller book is devoted to its author's gratitude for Proust.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eJames writes with exquisite perception and surgical precision; he is a poet of powerful argument and emotional force \u003cstrong\u003e- \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe Times\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"col-xs-12\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"book-detail\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"panel panel-default review\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"excerpt\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"reviewContent\"\u003e\n\u003cem\u003eA writer whose commanding voice contains a constant variety of colour and tone \u003cstrong\u003e- \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eObserver\u003c\/strong\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"panel panel-default review\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"excerpt\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"reviewContent\"\u003eAfter writing poems for 50 years, his technique is deft and assured\u003cstrong\u003e - Independent on Saturday\u003c\/strong\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"poetrybooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":27964260551,"sku":"9781509812356","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/9781509812356Gate_of_Lilacs.jpg?v=1471616447"},{"product_id":"the-skin-diary","title":"The Skin Diary","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003eAbegail Morley’s\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e new poetry collection \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003eThe Skin Diary\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e follows a Forward Prize shortlisted debut, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003eHow to Pour Madness into a Teacup\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e. These poems confront loss in its many forms with unwavering and astonishing clarity, yet there's an incandescent thread running through every line that makes each alive with fierce and steely energy.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003eHere are alert and lyrical poems that hunt out imperfect hiding places, conjure up imaginary sisters and try to contain near-impossible sorrows that spill out of carrier bags and fill up archives. New skins and old disguises are stitched together, the fabric of life tries to hold fast whilst all else unravels and comes apart at the seams. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003eThe Skin Diary \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003edocuments the sometimes fragile and strange windfalls of our days and months; through hard times and thin ice, this journal is bleakly wry, brilliantly focused and brimming with uncanny and discomforting turns of event.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePraise for The Skin Diary:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e‘In\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e The Skin Diary\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e, potentialities of memory and sensation are nuanced, subtle, and limned in relationship to suffering, betrayal, and loss. Fluidities of image and rhythm create an individual and musical voice to carry the reflections and echoes the poet shivers across the mirroring surfaces and abysses of her ghostly, visceral, and unflinching poems.’\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e – Penelope Shuttle\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e‘Abegail Morley’s \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003eThe Skin Diary \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003eis a house haunted by imagined children and a permeating tragedy. Time passes in lost months and tides; slips away grain by grain. In her wanderings, the narrator yearns for a child and laments the lover lost to an empty sky. He is in every creak of the stairs and peers between branches at the bottom of the garden. Heartbreak is carried around in supermarket carrier bags: ‘first Waitrose, then Aldi’. The Skin Diary somehow finds words for the ineffable in its search for hope and understanding.’\u003cstrong\u003e \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e– Martin Figura\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e‘Morley’s tight poems unlock the prescient pain of childhood that reflects later on in loss; when she writes ‘some pain\/ is more intense than others’ there is sense that our pain can be limitless, but this collection seems to compartmentalise and analyse our human limitless capacity for pain and also our human limitations, with an emotional erudition that lifts even the banal into the realms of concatenating and complex subjective psychoanalysis. A life can be held within the construct of one person’s poetic contribution, and here is a poet who can hold her nerve and her entire psychological landscape within each multifariously conceived and consciously humane line.’ \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e– Melissa Lee-Houghton\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e‘Like the sea after depth charges detonate, Abegail Morley’s poems churn with remnants and signifiers. She rounds again and again on meaning, coming at it from all angles, to wrest meaning from the quotidian. Morley’s art is self-sacrificial and wholly generous. The imaginary is carefully harnessed. The ‘nearly’ and ‘almost’ become solid and historical. ‘Could-bes’ tower across her landscapes, rightfully statuesque, cloud giants. This careful lexicon Morley offers us here is nothing but essential.’\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e – Graham Clifford\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"poetrybooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":27964400007,"sku":"9781911027041","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/b125ba2acb-Skin_Diary_Cover.jpg?v=1471616673"},{"product_id":"muddy-river-selected-poems","title":"Muddy River: Selected Poems","description":"\u003cspan\u003eSergey Stratanovsky’s \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eMuddy River\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is the first comprehensive English-language selection of a contemporary existentialist Russian master. Taken together, the poems express the full range of Stratanovsky’s verse, drawing on seven collections that represent half a century of writing. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eMuddy River \u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003eis the essential Anglophone introduction to Stratanovsky’s oeuvre, its now satirical, now psalmic, ever-searching poetics.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003e‘It is very difficult in a few words to point to an unprecedented quality in Stratanovsky’s work. It seems to me that his particularity is not even in how it is expressed, but from where it is articulated, there where sound has its source. From somewhere terribly deep: in a time of faith and magic, where and when element and consciousness are not divided and continue to constitute a meaningful whole.’ - \u003c\/em\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMikhail Aizenberg \u003c\/strong\u003e","brand":"poetrybooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":27964703303,"sku":"9781847772534","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/mudy_river.jpg?v=1471617051"},{"product_id":"camera-obscura-2","title":"Camera Obscura","description":"\u003cspan\u003eIn \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eCamera Obscura\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, the ‘dark chamber’ of the title is pierced by memory, real and imagined voices from the ancient and recent past and attempted communication across millennia and between species. Here a Schubert mass is remade as a poem, a sound recordist speaks from the battlefield of Towton and a Salisbury church builder bears witness to Magna Carta.\u003c\/span\u003e","brand":"poetrybooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":27965294919,"sku":"9781904851653","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/Rockingham_Press_-_Camera_Obscura.jpg?v=1471617713"},{"product_id":"playing-the-ghost-of-maimonides","title":"Playing the Ghost of Maimonides by John Agard","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eWinner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2012\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJohn Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 35 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. In this new collection, he puts on the mask of Moses Maimonides (aka\u003cem\u003e the Rambam\u003c\/em\u003e), the medieval Jewish rabbi and physician who wrote his \u003cem\u003eGuide of the Perplexed\u003c\/em\u003e in Arabic at a time when Judaism, Islam and Christianity cross-fertilised each other in Moorish Spain.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow the ghost of Maimonides returns to the contemporary world, no less perplexed, and trailed by the figure of the Jester, whose wise fool musings shadow Maimonides' discourses on a range of subjects from sectarian fanaticism to God's incorporeal lack of taste buds. In\u003cem\u003ePlaying the Ghost of Maimonides\u003c\/em\u003e, the rabbinical, the parabolical, the nonsensical, are symphonically interwoven in a thought-provoking romp of metaphysical shapeshifting that resonates with the current climate of extremism.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'John Agard's first book since he finally won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry is typically cosmopolitan, with one eye on the past and the other on the present...readers – especially schoolteachers and their pupils – tend to love his work... This thought-provoking, puckish, tender book will not disappoint them.' \u003cstrong\u003e– Rory Waterman, \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement,\u003c\/i\u003e on \u003ci\u003eTravel Light Travel Dark\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bloodaxe Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":27965418951,"sku":"9781780373096","price":9.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/55ca04258cbbf.jpg?v=1471617865"},{"product_id":"pearl-10","title":"Pearl","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA new version of the Middle English poem \u003ci\u003ePearl\u003c\/i\u003e, from the acclaimed poet and translator of \u003ci\u003eGawain and the Green Knight\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSimon Armitage's version of \u003ci\u003eSir Gawain and the Green Knight\u003c\/i\u003e garnered front-page reviews across two continents and confirmed his reputation as a leading translator.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis new work is an entrancing allegorical tale of grief and lost love, as the narrator is led on a Dantean journey through sorrow to redemption by his vanished beloved, Pearl. Retaining all the alliterative music of the original, a Medieval English poem thought to be by the same anonymous author responsible for Gawain, \u003ci\u003ePearl\u003c\/i\u003e is here brought to vivid and intricate life in care of one of the finest poets writing today.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eSir Gawain and the Green Knight:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'Takes you back closer to something of the thrill and the wonder the poem would have had in the days when it was composed. It might even be the best translation of any poem I've ever seen . [Armitage] was put on the planet to translate this poem.' - \u003cstrong\u003e\u003ci\u003eGuardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'[Armitage] captures his dialect and his landscape and takes great pains to render the tale's alliterative texture and drive . He has given us an energetic, free-flowing, high-spirited version.' - \u003cstrong\u003e\u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"poetrybooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":27965554119,"sku":"9780571302956","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/files\/9780571302963.jpg?v=1757576619"},{"product_id":"daodejing","title":"Daodejing","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eThese 81 brief poems from the 5\u003csup\u003eth\u003c\/sup\u003e century BCE make up a foundational text in world culture. In elegant, simple yet elusive language, the \u003ci\u003eDaodejing \u003c\/i\u003edevelops 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.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003eLaozi, the putative author, is said to have despaired of the world’s venality and corruption, but he was persuaded to leave the \u003ci\u003eDaodejing \u003c\/i\u003epoems as a parting gift, as inspiration and as a moral and political handbook. Crucefix’s versions reveal an astonishing empathy with what the poems have to say about good and evil, war and peace, government, language, poetry and the pedagogic process. When the true teacher emerges, no matter how detached, unimpressive, even muddled she may appear, Laozi assures us “there are treasures beneath”.\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Enitharmon Editions","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":27965753671,"sku":"9781910392263","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/51-evxtfljL.jpg?v=1477648505"},{"product_id":"bearings-3","title":"Bearings","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003eIn her fourth collection, Isobel Dixon takes readers on a journey to far-flung and sometimes dark places. From Robben Island to Hiroshima, Egypt to Edinburgh, the West Bank and beyond, these poems are forays of discovery and resistance, of arrival and loss.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003eBearings\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e sings of love too, and pays homage to lost friends and poets – the voices of John Berryman, Michael Donaghy, Robert Louis Stevenson and others echo here. And there is respite for the weary traveller – jazz in the shadows, an exuberant play of words between the fire and tremors.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003eIn this wide-ranging collection Dixon explores form and subject, keeping a weather eye out for telling detail, with a sharp sense of the threat that these journeys, our wars and stories, and our very existence pose to the planet.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003ePraise for \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003eBearings\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e:\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e'Here is a new collection by a poet at ease with a variety of forms and approaches, and possessing the confidence to address experiment in her work. Her voice is questioning and searching; she presents the vitality of the natural world with strong lyricism and close observation. Cruelty and violence are never dodged, but brought alive in all their rawness and visceral challenge. The poems often sparkle with colour, and are feisty, full of rich doubt, and complex considerations of world and self. Wordplay is used productively to examine and\/or establish identity. There’s also much wit as in ‘I have a case of Gothic Cathedral Neck’. A controlled but fast-paced forward movement in the writing draws the reader along at an exhilarating pace. Much energy is released into being by these poems, whether the poet is drawing on her South African roots in both contemporary and historic settings, particularly in the striking and ambitious ‘Women at a Christmas Party, Robben Island, 19th Century’, along with its companion piece ‘Truths and Reconciliations’, or whether her subject is Seville, Cambridge or Dubai. A wide-ranging collection in many senses then, venturesome and powerful, remaining in the mind long after reading. Highly-recommended.' \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e- \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003ePenelope Shuttle\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e‘Isobel Dixon's recent poems confirm her sumptuous gift of mining for melody all the way down to the syllable, but it is remarkable how she can go on tightening her focus even as she widens her range of topic. The gorgeous and sometimes horrifying specificity she began by finding in her native South Africa she has gone on to find all over the world, even in the tumult of the Middle East. With every airport lounge a new starting point, her poetry is truly an international event. Admiringly, one is forced to the conclusion that she is becoming a poet who, far from hiding in lyricism, uses it for adventure and exploration, like a magician's cloak. Her work is a perpetual transformation, inexhaustible even though anything in it can be said aloud, and indeed demands to be. There is something new under the sun on every page.’\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\"\u003e - Clive James\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"poetrybooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":27965960071,"sku":"9781911027027","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/8189284dcf-Bearings_Cover-3.jpg?v=1471618486"},{"product_id":"falling-awake","title":"Falling Awake by Alice Oswald  \u003cb\u003e PBS Choice Autumn 2016  \u003c\/b\u003e","description":"\u003ch4\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #000000;\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePBS Choice - Autumn 2016\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAlice Oswald’\u003c\/strong\u003es poems are always vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, \u003cspan\u003ephysically\u003c\/span\u003e, engaged in the natural world. 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This beautifully intelligent collection of poetry will delight and inspire the reader.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"poetrybooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":34589164679,"sku":"9781781723180","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/Animal_People.jpg?v=1479988746"},{"product_id":"meanwhile-trees","title":"Meanwhile, Trees","description":"\u003cp\u003eThese poems may sometimes pretend they’re joking but they never really are. And what is it they’re not joking about? Death for one thing, and the fact that we don’t actually know who we are, and the fact that we don’t truly know who our loved ones are, or what art is, or anything else for that matter.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSometimes it feels as though someone has run off with meaning. It’s no longer to be found where we could once expect to find it, perhaps in religion or in nature or in art, and these poems set off in search of it. Their aim is to see if there’s a way of looking and a way of using language that can bring some meaning back to the world, because without it, we’re lost. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMeanwhile, Trees\u003c\/em\u003e is \u003cstrong\u003eMark Waldron\u003c\/strong\u003e’s third collection, following \u003cem\u003eThe Brand New Dark\u003c\/em\u003e (2008) and \u003cem\u003eThe Itchy Sea\u003c\/em\u003e (2011), both published by Salt.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘Clearly, Waldron has enough wit and imagination to sink a battleship, but perhaps the most interesting thing about his work is the use to which he puts features widely disseminated in contemporary poetry: randomness, whimsy, play and inconsequence…. When Waldron exploits these traits and turns them inside out, he shows an impressive elegance and rhetorical power, sustained despite a blizzard of broken registers and bits of this and that. His work reveals an authority it might at first seem far from seeking. The outcome is poetry that might count for something.’ – Sean O’Brien, \u003cem\u003eGuardian\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘His special skill is comedy, but not the standup sort. His speakers expose themselves self-accusingly, defiantly, or bashfully, while at the same time seeming snug as bugs in their tightly interlocked chainmail of precise language….  And there lies the delight of the collection: it gives us a rare sense of the Elizabethan richness of an English that’s available right now. Underneath the defamiliarising ingenuity, the political pretension-pricking and all the narrative verve and swerve, the diction is the real star of this invigorating book.’ – Carol Rumens, \u003cem\u003eObserver\u003c\/em\u003e, Poetry Book of the Month [on\u003cem\u003e Meanwhile, Trees\u003c\/em\u003e]\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘Waldron’s poems are good at building a world, scaling out from close-ups of small objects to galactic constellations that absorb and skew their more recognizable scenes and references’. – John McAuliffe, \u003cem\u003eThe Poetry Review \u003c\/em\u003e[on\u003cem\u003e Meanwhile, Trees\u003c\/em\u003e]\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘This quite astonishing collection should certainly be placed in the library, but carefully, with the most quizzical, ironical and independently-minded of older students directed towards it with glee: they will never have read anything quite like it before.’ – Frank Startup, \u003cem\u003eThe School Librarian \u003c\/em\u003e[on\u003cem\u003e Meanwhile, Trees\u003c\/em\u003e]\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘Mark Waldron is the most striking and unusual new voice to have emerged in British poetry for some time. His offbeat observations and surreal imaginings are set off by a precise management of tone and mordant sense of humour. There is much black comedy in these poems but at the same time it becomes evident that a deeply humane sensibility is at work. His great gift is to face two ways at once: to our received culture, traditional and popular, and towards odd new ways of imagining ourselves. He brings to bear a sharp ear for the absurd coupled with a sure footed clarity and grace of speech. This enables him to write unforeseeable wordplays and images. In this way, his work captures exactly the uncertain mix of what it is to be a person living today – I really cannot recommend it highly enough.’ – John Stammers\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘Every so often you forget just how good Mark Waldron is. Then you read a random poem and end up hissing \"damn\" like a thwarted villain.’ – Kirsten Irving \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"poetrybooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":34589190535,"sku":"9781780372969","price":9.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/Meanwhile_Trees.jpg?v=1479988878"},{"product_id":"declare","title":"Declare","description":"\u003cstrong\u003eGeraldine Clarkson\u003c\/strong\u003e lives in the Midlands. She comes from a family of ten, and her poetry is influenced by her roots in the West of Ireland, and years which she spent in monastic life, including three years in the Peruvian desert. Since she began writing, she has been selected as an Arvon\/Jerwood mentee, and has received commendations in the Arvon International and the UK National Poetry Competitions. In 2015, she won the \u003cem\u003ePoetry London \u003c\/em\u003eand\u003cem\u003e Ambit\u003c\/em\u003e competitions, and the \u003cem\u003eMagma\u003c\/em\u003e Editors’, Ver Poets and Anne Born Prizes. \u003cem\u003eDeclare\u003c\/em\u003e is her first chapbook.","brand":"poetrybooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":34589480455,"sku":"9781848615069","price":6.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/Declare.jpg?v=1479990302"},{"product_id":"beyond-the-barbed-wire","title":"Beyond the Barbed Wire","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cem\u003eBeyond the Barbed Wire\u003c\/em\u003e is a selection of work by Morocco’s greatest living poet. \u003cstrong\u003eAbdellatif Laâbi\u003c\/strong\u003e’s poetry and literary activism has inspired a generation of writers and thinkers, and it resulted in his decade-long imprisonment. This volume gives a career-spanning overview of Laâbi’s poetry, from the late 1960s to the 2010s. It includes a generous selection of the prison-writings of the 1970s, poems that speak from ‘beyond the borders of what is human’, as the poet writes, a hinterland of physical and emotional torture, in which hunger strikes are ‘the only weapon we’ve left’. Among these is a poem addressed to the poet’s cell, which is ‘right here \/ inside me \/ like a second body’, and another written piecemeal to friends on the outside and later reassembled. \u003cem\u003eBeyond the Barbed Wire\u003c\/em\u003e pays testament to the human need to speak in the face of censorship, that ‘epic of silence’. These poems, Laâbi’s ‘bitter fruits of the murderous twilight’, renew the possibility of a poetry that is genuinely urgent, necessary: a poetry of anger, anguish, love, wit, and hope, touched by a philosopher’s vision and perspicuity. The book includes an interview with the poet in which he discusses his practice, his views on education, his beliefs about a poet’s duty, the influence of his parents, and his optimism. With Laâbi’s renewed prominence in the Moroccan intellectual scene following the Arab Spring, and with a new generation of artists and activists looking to him as a source of inspiration, this book shows why Laâbi is more than Morocco’s leading poet, but also a guiding cultural and political force.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cem\u003e‘These extraordinary, energetic poems, which grab the reader by the throat both linguistically and morally, are about the power of language itself.’ \u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSue Hubbard, \u003cem\u003ePoetry London\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cem\u003e‘Laâbi's finest poems are virtuosic performances, turning political crises into poetic occasions and combining a flair for self-dramatization with stunning verbal inventiveness.’ \u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRobyn Creswell, \u003cem\u003eHarper’s Magazine\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cem\u003e‘When it comes to “raising a song of possibilities above the dirge of cruelty”, Laâbi is still without rival.’ \u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eStacy Hardy, \u003cem\u003eThe Chimurenga Chronic\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Carcanet Press Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":34589497735,"sku":"9781784100520","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/Beyond_the_Barbed_Wire.jpg?v=1479990489"},{"product_id":"the-knowledge-weapon","title":"The Knowledge Weapon","description":"\u003cstrong\u003eAnnette C. Boehm\u003c\/strong\u003e won the Bare Fiction Debut Poetry Collection Competition 2015, as judged by award winning poet Andrew McMillan, and I’m very pleased to say that you can now pre-order her prize-winning collection \u003cem\u003eThe Knowledge Weapon\u003c\/em\u003e right here on our online store.","brand":"poetrybooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":34589876039,"sku":"9781910896037","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/The_Knowledge_Weapon.png?v=1479993253"},{"product_id":"sunshine-1","title":"Sunshine by Melissa Lee-Houghton.","description":"\u003cp\u003eSunshine is the new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. A writer of startling confession, her poems inhabit the lonely hotel rooms, psych wards and deserted lanes of austerity Britain.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eSunshine\u003c\/i\u003e combines acute social observation with a dark, surreal humour born of first-hand experience. Abuse, addiction and mental health are all subject to Lee-Houghton’s poetic eye. But these are also poems of extravagance, hope and desire, that stake new ground for the Romantic lyric in an age of social media and internet porn. In this new book of poems, Melissa Lee-Houghton shines a light on human ecstasy and sadness with blinding precision.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eIncludes\u003c\/i\u003e ‘i am very precious’ – Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2016.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penned in the Margins","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":34590182855,"sku":"9781908058386","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/Penned_in_the_Margins_-_Sunshine.png?v=1479995062"},{"product_id":"dirt","title":"Dirt by Billy Letford","description":"\u003cstrong\u003eBilly Letford\u003c\/strong\u003e’s \u003cem\u003eDirt \u003c\/em\u003erevels in the fallow, the tainted, the off , and the unloved. The poems embrace a good life stitched together with bad circumstances, bungled chances, missed callings. Whether loitering on the street corner, ‘poackets ful eh ma fingers’, or stumbling from a bar ‘like a monkey in the jungle of traffic, stinking, wild and free’, the characters in Letford’s poems deliver one thing in spades: heart. ‘On Friday I visit my seventy-seven-year-old granny. She’s smoking a joint. It’s not a surprise.’ Letford’s words are lightly worn yet carefully measured; they move between English and Scots, lyrical and concrete, accumulating what the poet has described as an array of textures. Resisting modernity’s unearthly glare, it is a life with grain, with grit, ‘rotten with wonder’, that Letford seeks. The poems dig for a grace within dirt’s humble endurance. ‘There’s dignity there. Lay yourself open.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003e'William Letford is his own man. His work is as utterly original and instantly recognisable as, say, Raymond Carver’s or Billy Collins’, though he’s not like either. His last collection launched a brand new voice. This one, full of grit and tenderness, gives us many voices, places and stories.'\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLiz Lochhead \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003e‘The pleasure I have gained from new Scottish genius William Letford’s poems... will, I am confident, stay with me forever.’\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e- Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian\u003c\/strong\u003e","brand":"Carcanet","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":34590602055,"sku":"9781784102005","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/Dirt.jpg?v=1479996826"},{"product_id":"beginning-with-your-last-breath","title":"Beginning With Your Last Breath by Roy McFarlane","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; color: #000000;\"\u003eThis debut collection of poems by former Birmingham Poet Laureate \u003cstrong\u003eRoy McFarlane\u003c\/strong\u003e explores love, loss, adoption and identity in powerful, precise and emotionally-charged poetry. From bereavement comes forth a life story in poems; the journey of sons, friends, lovers and parents, and all the moments of growing-up, discovery, falling in and out of love and learning to say goodbye that come along the way. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; color: #000000;\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; color: #000000;\"\u003eThemes of place, music, history, and race interweave personal narratives, with poems that touch on everything from the ‘Tebbitt Test’ and Marvin Gaye to the Black Country, that 'place just off the M6'. Distinct and memorable, McFarlane’s poems are beautifully crafted, intricately focused, moving their readers between both the spiritual and the sensual worlds with graceful, rapturous hymns to the transformative power of love. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; color: #000000;\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #000000;\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;\"\u003e'\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic;\"\u003eThere’s something I need to tell you\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;\"\u003e, says a voice in the first poem of Roy McFarlane’s\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic;\"\u003e Beginning with Your Last Breath\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;\"\u003e, which opens with a deeply personal and moving account of the discovery of an adoption. But the need to tell resounds throughout this collection - moving through lost love and friendships, the politics of place, race and culture and the salvatory power of music. The writing is always evocative, with a great care for the detail. These are poems of great power.' \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;\"\u003e- Hannah Lowe\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; color: #000000;\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #000000;\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;\"\u003e'So many of these poems have a novelistic power to hold the reader through their tense interior domains. This is a riveting poetry about loss and recovery, about pride, about boxing, basketball, Norman Tebbit and sex, though not all at once. I love the tight yet welcoming lines of each poem and McFarlane’s ability to concentrate the image, my best was perhaps the reference to ‘a stomach filled with cage birds’. Disturbing yet uplifting verse!' \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;\"\u003e- Daljit Nagra\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; color: #000000;\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #000000;\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;\"\u003e‘I had tears in my eyes reading some of these poems. In\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic;\"\u003e Beginning with Your Last Breath\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;\"\u003e, McFarlane holds the reader’s attention expertly through deeply moving, emotional and personal narratives. His adroit use of rhythm, rhyme and repetition draws us unselfconsciously into passionate and complex reflections on familial and cultural identity, social and political injustice, loss, love, sensuality and spirituality. Combining the skills of the orator, poet, craftsman and bard, Roy McFarlane has created, in\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic;\"\u003e Beginning with Your Last Breath\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;\"\u003e, a very special debut.’\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;\"\u003e – Ruby Robinson\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"poetrybooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":34590784711,"sku":"9781911027089","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/Nine_Arches_Press_-_Beginning_With_Your_Last_Breath.jpg?v=1479997101"},{"product_id":"playing-the-octopus","title":"Playing the Octopus","description":"\u003cem\u003e‘He avoids the pipes. He has his reasons.\u003cbr\u003eHe has heard the story\u003cbr\u003eOf the octopus who was locked into a room\u003cbr\u003eFor a week to practice.\u003cbr\u003eWhen they let him out the pipes had learned\u003cbr\u003eTo play the octopus.\u003cbr\u003eThe thing about musicians is\u003cbr\u003eThey respond to glory.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003cem\u003ePlaying the Octopus\u003c\/em\u003e, her eighth collection of poems, \u003cstrong\u003eMary O’Malley\u003c\/strong\u003e’s sensitivity to the spirit of Ireland’s west coast is as attuned as ever. In a world both earthen and dreamlike, bodily and mythical, a trout is seen to ‘swallow light through his skin’, a wolf ‘howls the great open vowel of his need’, and in the emptiness where a tree once stood, ‘a tree-shaped brightness dances’. Over the course of the collection, O’Malley twins the Irish west coast with the American east coast, Inis Mór with Coney Island, the parish with the metropolis, the pipes with the axe, each offering its own comfort and wonder. Sylvia Plath, Lois Lane and Antigone feature in an unlikely cast of heroines through which O’Malley tests the mythologies of motherhood and femininity (‘no mother is ever good enough until she’s dead’, writes the poet, with characteristic wit). \u003cem\u003ePlaying the Octopus\u003c\/em\u003e is a body of writing buoyed by the redemptive power and sustaining joy of music, and it closes with O’Malley’s translations of the Irish poet Seán Ó Ríordáin and the Spaniard Federico García Lorca.\u003cem\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e","brand":"poetrybooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":34591053575,"sku":"9781784102807","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/Playing_the_Octopus.jpg?v=1479997607"},{"product_id":"heath","title":"Heath","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #000000;\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;\"\u003eCriss-crossed with desire-lines and flight paths, \u003cstrong\u003ePenelope Shuttle\u003c\/strong\u003e and \u003cstrong\u003eJohn Greening\u003c\/strong\u003e’s \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic;\"\u003eHeath\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;\"\u003e is a wild chorus of poems written in call and response across Hounslow Heath. Through bramble, furze and over wild tracks, we explore the run-out grooves of a rapidly vanishing edgeland that may soon go under the tarmac of the proposed third runway at Heathrow. This is eco-poetry beautifully realised and retold in the form of a contemporary fable, straying from the known routes into the borderlands between the human, natural and the supernatural. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #000000;\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;\"\u003eAlone on the heath, under the constellations of aircraft holding patterns, and with only these eloquent, shape-shifting poems as our guide, we encounter highwaymen, witches and ghosts, follow the tracks of the last wolf in England, and find ourselves incanting the heath’s calendar of spells and enchantments. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic;\"\u003eHeath\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\" mobile-undersized-upper\" style=\"font-family: 'Merriweather Sans','One Open Sans','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; color: #d9d9d9;\"\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #000000;\"\u003e speaks to us, sings its own centuries-old song of seasons; both born and raised in its shadow, Shuttle and Greening’s deep connection of memory to this place brings forth a remarkable cycle of magical and bitter-sweet poems.\u003c\/span\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"poetrybooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":34591689671,"sku":"9781911027065","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/products\/Nine_Arches_Press_-_Heath.jpg?v=1480000229"},{"product_id":"professor-harrimans-steam-air-ship","title":"Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eProfessor Harriman’s Steam Air-Ship\u003c\/strong\u003e \u003c\/em\u003echarts a contemporary landscape of violence and death while reaching for joy and aiming for flight. 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