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Harald in Byzantium

Kevin Crossley-Holland

Harald in Byzantium

The Viking Harald Hardrada was the greatest warrior of his age. After fighting in Russia and serving in the Varangian Guard in Byzantium, he returned to Norway in 1045 to contest, and win, the crown. He was killed at the battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066.

In this sequence of short poems, Kevin Crossley-Holland assumes the persona of Harald during his formative years in Byzantium and writes about his engagement with warfare, leadership and love.

Chris Riddell’s striking illustrations bring out the drama, passion and wit of the poems to the full. This partnership of poet and artist, already celebrated for their Arthur, the Always King (2021), can be seen at its best in Harald in Byzantium.

  • Chapbook £8.00 £7.20 available

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Your Nearness

Forrest Gander

Your Nearness

Forrest Gander knows that the poet’s first duty is “to see what’s there and not already patterned by familiarity” – and in Your Nearness he brings to that task a combination of vision, generosity of spirit and humility in the face of wonder that singles him out as one of the finest, and most vigilant, poets working in English today.

John Burnside

There’s a deep personal feeling found in Forrest Gander’s desperately beautiful ‘Librettos for Eros’ [in which] feeling masters the poems, and it is feeling about self, desperate, squandered, willful, all but out of control – and ultimately uncivilized….

Thom Gunn

Your Nearness includes colour illustrations by the author.

  • Paperback £12.99 £11.69 available

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Places You Leave

James Byrne

Places You Leave

Beginning inside the largest refugee camp in the world (Cox’s Bazar) and ending up with Lorca in Granada, Places You Leave explores questions of travel, place / displacement, self / otherness, race, feminism, national and global politics. Through poems, poetic sequences and the lyric essay, Byrne considers a ‘poethics’ of place and speaks back to the complex nature of human experience. In his most hybrid work to date, including original collages from seven different countries, Byrne advocates for activist but peaceful ways in which language might challenge existing social structures and the dynamics of power.

Places you Leave is relentlessly energetic and politically insistent without ever being pedantic, these are knife-sharp glimpses of the world. The specificity of the details – spindling out over and again – never releases us. We’re yanked along image by image, observation by observation. And, suddenly, it occurs that we’re the angel going backwards with the world collapsing in our wake.

Forrest Gander
  • Paperback £12.99 £11.69 available

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Five Scenes from a Failed Revolution

Ashur Etwebi

Five Scenes from a Failed Revolution

The poems in this collection move from memories of Libya before the revolution, to Libya engulfed in violent turmoil, to life in exile in the brooding landscape of Norway. Seen through the eyes of the refugee poet, the vibrant colours of the Libyan landscape, the horrors and ravages of revolution, and the strangeness of a new life within the Arctic Circle, come into sharp focus in this powerful book.

In Five Scenes from a Failed Revolution, Etwebi deftly
moves through time, space, argument and protest to
capture the essence of the 2011 Arab Spring along
with fragments from the poet’s past. The work brims
with astonishing technique and lyricism, holding
both the poet’s personal history and that of the
onlooking world. ‘Oh bird, from the treetop, can you
see Etwebia? / Can you smell the orange blossoms
of my dead brother?’ In this utt erly arresting image
taken from ‘Norwegian Blues’, Etwebi eff ortlessly
transcends the present, shooting his poems way
into an atmosphere without end. As tragic as it
sometimes feels, this for me is the collection’s most
remarkable achievement.


ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU

Etwebi maintains his composure as a lyric poet…
insisting on distilled moments of revelation while
addressing his nation Libya’s most turbulent epochs
… [these] poems provide solace and rejuvenate,
holding on to memory and the purity of their
anguish. This is a stunning, beautiful book, one I’ve
been awaiting for a long time.

KHALED MATTAWA
  • Paperback £11.99 £10.79 available

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North Sea Poems

Heinrich Heine

North Sea Poems

This bilingual chapbook offers a selection from Heinrich Heine’s sequence of poems Die Nordsee (The North Sea) which formed part of his Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs). Published in 1827 when Heine was in his late 20s, the Book of Songs launched his career, which over the following thirty years made him the major figure in German literature in the generation following Goethe and Schiller.

The North Sea sequence is expressive of Heine’s complicated relation to Romanticism, of which he was both an exponent and an ironic observer. Written in free verse rather than the rhymed quatrains he usually used, these poems explore the intersections between myth and everyday life in vivid scenes which mirror the fluid motions and moods of the sea.

  • Chapbook £8.00 £7.20 available

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Thirty Poems in Thirty Days

Amanda Dalton

Thirty Poems in Thirty Days

In 2020, Amanda Dalton participated – for the second year running – in National Poetry Writing Month, a project that challenges the public to write a poem every day throughout the month of April. Each midnight, new instructions are posted informing participants what they should write about in the next 24 hours – anything from an ode to life’s small pleasures to a concrete poem, to a poem from the viewpoint of a figure in Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’.

This chapbook contains the unedited versions of the thirty poems that Amanda wrote. By turns witty (often very funny), clever, moving and erudite, this short collection represents an astonishing achievement by an outstanding writer.

  • Chapbook £8.00 £7.20 available

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Kraków Testimonies

Piotr Florczyk

Kraków Testimonies

What happened to Kraków’s Jews? The poet Piotr Florczyk, who was born in Kraków, set himself the task of finding out, and to this end listened to recorded testimonies of Holocaust survivors from Kraków at the Visual History Archive during a period of research study at the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Centre.

In the poems collected here, Florczyk retells the stories of these survivors for a new audience, exploring their interactions with their surroundings, their families, their neighbours and their oppressors.

Thus there emerges, through the work of the poet as story-teller, not only a shared history of Kraków but, for the reader, a sense of those voices that might otherwise be forgotten, speaking again in poems of extraordinary clarity and simplicity.

  • Chapbook £8.00 £7.20 available

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Invisible

Jacek Gutorow

Invisible

Invisible is a teasing title for a collection of poetry. [Wallace] Stevens, with whose work Jacek Gutorow has a deep and sustained engagement, suggested in ‘The Creations of Sound’, that poems should ‘make the visible a little hard / To see’ […] Both Gutorow and Stevens develop a poetic medium that maintains an oscillating dialectic between the seen and the unseen. The invisible operates not as an occlusion of reality, but as an aura saturating what is described; images are gently prised from the contexts of time and place and invested with a mysterious in-between life...

Mark Ford, from the Introduction to Invisible
  • Paperback £11.99 £10.79 available

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After Dante: Poets in Purgatory

ed. Nick Havely

After Dante: Poets in Purgatory

Dante's Purgatorio has been described as the most 'human' of the three parts of his Comedy, and it can also be seen as a 'singing school' for poets. This new complete translation by sixteen contemporary poets enters into dialogue with Dante's text by rendering it in a variety of different Anglophone voices — American, Australian, British, Irish, Jamaican, Scottish and Singaporean. The poets in this Purgatorio adopt a range of forms, from blank verse to terza rima, and their translations are accompanied by explanatory notes, a 'prelude' of poems about Purgatory, and a 'postscript' of newly-translated medieval Italian lyrics relating to Dante and his poem.

  • Paperback £19.99 £17.99 available

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Solar Eclipse 1914

Arseny Tarkovsky

Solar Eclipse 1914

Readers will be deeply grateful to the late Peter Oram for giving new life to the work of a major Russian poet who has never been fully recognized in the English- speaking world – even if his haunting words have been heard in Russian by the millions who have seen his son’s film Mirror.

Arseny Tarkovsky lived through the Soviet period from beginning to end, preserving his inner independence and leaving a precious legacy of memorable lyrics that achieve a dream-like potency of suggestion. Oram’s inventive and beautifully shaped translations combine in an exemplary way poetic freedom and a careful attention to the form and the sentiment of the originals.

Peter France, Professor Emeritus, University of Edinburgh
  • Paperback £10.99 £9.89 available

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