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“A meeting point for poets of all latitudes”
— Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

Poetry from the UK & Ireland

Over 150 titles of contemporary poetry from the UK and Ireland.

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Showing 1 - 10 of 233 results
Lizard Looks

Prue Chamberlayne

Lizard Looks

The past and distant past creeps through the lines and unsaid words in these poems; they explore how the past forms the present and connects our shared humanity. These are sensual poems, where sound, history and the natural world are dominant.

  • Paperback forthcoming

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Collected Poems 1972 - 2024

Kevin Crossley-Holland

Collected Poems 1972 - 2024

Prize-winning poet Kevin Crossley-Holland has been described by Philip Pullman as ‘a master, a magician and commander of the language’, a view that this eagerly-awaited Collected Poems will undoubtedly support.

  • Paperback forthcoming

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Nightsongs for Gaia

James Byrne

Nightsongs for Gaia

Nightsongs for Gaia: New and Selected Poems spans over twenty years of James Byrne’s poetic practice. Accomplished in both formal and innovative modes, Byrne’s poetry is visionary, attentive and curious, encapsulating a global sensibility. Selecting from seven full collections and various pamphlets, Nightsongs brings together works unavailable in England until now. Here, we encounter a poetics that works with communities to further consider a sense of self and otherness and is unique in its musicality. Nightsongs celebrates the work of one of the most gifted poets of his generation.

James Byrne's poetry has always been lyrically complex, with a voice that is singular and instantly striking. What particularly strikes the reader of his Nightsongs for Gaia: New and Selected Poems is its capaciousness. This book takes us on a journey from his youth, via places of recent conflict such as Myanmar and Libya in way that few contemporary writers across the globe can match. He makes most poets writers today look like they’re jogging in a bathtub.

Antony Rowland
  

Nightsongs for Gaia presents alchemical fissures of a heart reduced to gold with no other substance to turn (in)to. A fiery presence of augury, of premonition, burns from the outset with a wary flame. Byrne has seen many places, been many things, and  undergone visceral self-haunting in many guises. To say the Nightsongs are oracular is to understate the poet's own sense of knowingness. Here, exquisite beauty prevails.

Kirsten Norrie

James Byrne’s Nightsongs for Gaia is an extraordinary body of work—restless, urgent, and deeply humane. These poems move fluidly between the intimate and the geopolitical, tracing loss, exile, and resilience with a precision that is both unflinching and tender. Byrne affirms poetry as an act of witness and transformation. This is a vital, necessary collection.

Aaron Kent
  • Paperback forthcoming

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Can the Dandelions be Trusted?

Katherine Gallagher

Can the Dandelions be Trusted?

Katherine Gallagher has a loyal readership both in the UK and in her native Australia and her latest book from Arc will not disappoint. Ranging in time and place from her childhood in the Australian outback to heady youthful days in Paris of the ‘60s, to slower-paced recent years in the gardens and open spaces around her north London home, these poems are full of a colour and energy that paint a picture of life lived to the full, and also a reflectiveness, a gentle humour, and occasionally a sense of loss, as the poet looks back on times past.

  • Paperback £10.99 £9.89 available

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Ergo

Michelene Wandor

Ergo

Michelene Wandor’s fifth book from Arc is a book of love poems – and not-love poems. By turns fierce and gentle, passionate and bitter, they push at the boundaries of minimalist language and pack an emotional punch that will remain with the reader long after the book is closed.

  • Chapbook £8.00 £7.20 available

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Modern Fog

Chris Emery

Modern Fog

Emery brings an unusually wide-ranging poetic vocabulary to the encounters in Modern Fog, depicting wildlife on the Norfolk Broads or a multi-storey car park with equal fluency. These are elegiac, tough-minded poems of marked originality and scope.

  • Paperback £10.99 £9.89 available

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Arboretum for the Hunted

Fred d'Aguiar

Arboretum for the Hunted

There has always been an intense physicality
to D’Aguiar’s work, matched by a penchant for
geographic groundedness and a biographical
perspicacity, that has made him one of the finest
writers of his generation.

What is most striking about this chapbook is
how much keeps him dreaming, even in places and
situations where many imaginations would stumble
and falter in the face of the relentless violence to
which we have all become far too inured.

There is hardly a Black British writer working
today who doesn’t owe D’Aguiar a considerable
debt, whether they know it or not.

  • Chapbook £8.00 £7.20 available

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Boy Thing

John Wedgwood Clarke

Boy Thing

Boy Thing is a thing of wonder. These are poems
that negotiate anew the tender, hurt territory
of a boy abruptly unfathered with every fresh
reading; and that travel into the wonderment of
becoming a father of boys. We are given a
boy’s-eye-view of 1970s Cornwall with a
music and detail so meticulous that we yearn with
Clarke for its lost territories. But these are not just
poems of archive or archaeology;
they are revelatory, dynamic and raw.
Clarke is crucially attuned to the secret
messages received in boyhood – its
preoccupations and awakenings, epiphanies
and abuses, and its shames. This book is
unmissable: human and humane,
grimy and sublime.”

Fiona Benson

Boy Thing is a beautiful book – sensual,
atmospheric, full of nature and ritual. These poems
while formally precise, possess a rawness that is
startling and utterly compelling.”

Ella Frears
  • Chapbook £8.00 £7.20 available

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Caldebroc

Antony Rowland

Caldebroc

“Antony Rowland digs the word hoard to unearth
sinewy lines of dark material – the insides of buried
histories, public and private. He is an archaeologist
of mourning: always alert to the unexpected coinage
(‘Shram bobs the gracht’), these poems pay tribute to
people and places lost and found, whether teenage
kinship with the Brontës, a foreboding proximity to
the Yorkshire Ripper, or celebrations of absent
friends. Channelling infl uences such as Geoff rey
Hill and Tony Harrison, Rowland sets out a project
uniquely his own to rework history in these
‘measures against outrages’, always alive to poetry’s
‘guilty retrieval’. These are formidable sequences,
scrupulous to a taint, steeped in the earth.”

Scott Thurston

“In Antony Rowland’s Caldebroc England’s North
revivifies its aural mythmaking. There is a lyric
wildness here met with a sonic concatenation that is
breathtaking, precise and tireless – electrifying place
by refuting the nation’s view of its marginal regions.
Even geographical and linguistic departures bring a
paradoxical insiderly displacement. Rowland’s
poetics of defamiliarisation, of elsewhere’s
habitations within the already-known, ultimately
stands between us – and any sense of home – asking
us not where we belong but why.”

Sandeep Parmar

“It’s rare to find a poet so brilliantly dexterous with
language… In Caldebroc, the reader travels across time
and history – from the Brontës’ Haworth, to Icelandic sagas
and global financial meltdown. Rowland constantly revives
poetic language and,in doing so, uses the full artistic
palette. The effect is both ecstatic and celebratory.”

James Byrne
  • Paperback £10.99 £9.89 available

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Travellers of the North

Fiona Smith

Travellers of the North

The tenth-century Saint Sunniva
made a miraculous voyage from
Ireland to the Western Norwegian
island of Selja, where she took
refuge in a cave. In 1170, her incorrupt
relics were translated from Selja
to Bergen Cathedral. This is an
attempt to liberate Sunniva
from her story.

  • Chapbook £8.00 £7.20 available

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