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Your basketPoetry from the UK & Ireland
Over 150 titles of contemporary poetry from the UK and Ireland.
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The Night We Were Dylan Thomas
Like a great photographer, MARA BERGMAN celebrates the moment and detail at the core of memory. Together, her poems show the great changes families experience – the free and fearless life of a young woman set alongside a dying mother hanging on so she can hold a great-grandchild, the one-sided conversations we have with the dead.
Her dynamism is infectious – you are drawn into this family’s wonder, love, compassion, grief and happiness. Bergman’s poems remind me of Pablo Neruda’s belief in the driving force of love: ‘Hold on to that, don’t let it get away …’ and one of the final poems, ‘The Happiness’, delivers the book’s message: ‘Before it leaves, I will bury it deep enough to save.’
After reading these poems, you’ll feel braced and ready, you’ll feel wiser and more generous, you’ll want to hold on to moments that contain your own astonishment.
A welcome and most welcoming varied new collection of Mara Bergman’s richly textured and sharply focused poems that explore and celebrate what she memorably calls ‘the gloriously ordinary’.
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Travellers
MICHELENE WANDOR’s new poetry collection travels in many directions, through Europe, the Middle East and beyond, with travellers as various as Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Isabella d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia. Thematically, the poems alight at Greek mythology, gender, and the evergreens of love, anguish, power and tragedy.
The first and final touchpoints lie in the language itself, which is both guide and sustenance. Lyrical, narrative and startlingly evocative, the words and poetic shapes travel down and across pages and spaces, and continue to resonate in mind and memory.
A rich and remarkable collection
— Alan Brownjohn
- Chapbook
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Gravity for Beginners
In Kevin Crossley-Holland’s first new collection of poems for six years, time and thought and memory – the breath of life – are the prevailing winds, while much of the ground it inhabits is the ‘heavenly squelch’ of his own north Norfolk where ‘the word on the tip of your tongue may be sacramental’.
Crossley-Holland uncovers not only words but an entire landscape which haunts and is rich in echoes.
His language has been honed by the Norfolk and Suffolk climate itself, and has the polish of split flint.
His poetry is accessible yet uncompromisingly contemporary...
It takes a pause in the familiar current of one's consciousness to come to one's accustomed place afresh and — as Eliot put it — 'know the place for the first time'. [...] The ability to see the essence behind the appearance is an art in which Crossley-Holland has few, if any, equals.
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The Marks on the Map
The treasure's there / only for the finding.
Every good poem is an expedition of sorts. In lesser work we are led towards a carefully landscaped revelation which always belongs wholly to the poet, but in the effective poem we're set loose and, following a map partly of our own making, find ourselves at last in a distant corner of ourselves. In The Marks on the Map Brian Johnstone takes us on a remarkable journey, not just to discover what is there, but also what was there, mapping time as well as space. This is one map I would urge readers to follow, because the world through which Johnstone guides us is so utterly moving, so totally familiar and so entirely new.
Surefooted in his work as cartographer of the overlooked, Johnstone takes us on an expansive journey in this absorbing collection of tributes, stories and memories as he maps out the effects of time on people and places. Throughout, we encounter that characteristic Johnstone timbre — one of respect, sophistication and, above all, grace.
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Diary of a Divorce
This sequence of poems about the
disintegration of a marriage and its aftermath
captures how quotidian events inexorably
contribute to the breakdown of unity, identity,
and truth between partners and how they are
reforged over time within oneself. Because of
the poet’s candour, these poems aff ord the
reader a rare understanding of the processes
at work, and at the same time are both a
lament and a reclamation.
This is an exceptional debut collection.
The whole pamphlet is heartbreakingly beautiful.
... incredibly powerful, forensic and unwavering, and of course word-perfect. I'm very taken by how unexpected so many of your turns of phrase are, the way you move between powerful punches and graceful almost-analytical perspectives. A work of art...
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The Years
Winner of the Michael Marks Illustration Award
Short-listed for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet Award
With a number of highly-acclaimed poetry collections to his name, this well-known poet has produced a chapbook of enigmatic and beautifully-crafted poems, each of which is accompanied by an illustration by the poet who reveals himself as an accomplished artist. This will undoubtedly be a collector's piece.
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A Friable Earth
Jackie Wills brings a multitude of characters to these poems including a young man sleeping in his car, an amateur entomologist, bird catchers, her jilted aunt, Ray Dorset, the three Robins, the office cleaner, family, friends and several gardeners. Her poems move from the GP surgery to eye clinic, dance studio to allotment, back and forward in time and from Brighton's streets to the landscapes of South Africa. In this collection, a woman caught unawares by a changing body and attitudes as she ages strains to see the funny side of her last smear. But there are also many elegies and tributes to old friends in A Friable Earth, Wills' sixth collection of poems. Her work has been described as irreverent, bewitching, compassionate and surreal. She's written extensively about women's lives. She's also worked an allotment for 20 years.
Jackie Wills shows a poem remains a
deeply human magic.
A Friable Earth investigates with
compassion memory and time, the ache
of what we can never know, people who
exist in the cracks. Vintage Wills.
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The Caprices
The Caprices is a sequence of poems written in response to Goya's Los Caprichos, a series of aquatints in the Prado Museum in Madrid. Each of the 80 poems is illustrated by the etching to which it responds, and shares its title. As James Byrne writes in his introduction: "Goya's Los Caprichos are a series of real-life nightmares that haunt the twenty-first century. [...] Arguably, the world we live in today is more terrifying than Goya's Spain because — in over two hundred years since he created Los Caprichos — we have become more cool about human inhumanity. The echo grows louder, the world becomes more absurd, more criminal and yet, perversely, our collective response all too often verges on the whimsical. Goya, echoing in his deafness, hears our own, capturing all these elements variously throughout his masterwork."
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Not on the Side of the Gods
Anna Crowe writes to rescue obscure stories and give a voice to things that have no voice. Her poems celebrate the mystery and diversity of the natural world while mourning its fragility. Birds fly in and out of poems in which lurk extraordinary invertebrates and strange plants; the vulnerability of human lives and family relationships is another concern. One of the foremost translators of Catalan poetry into English, her appetite for language is rooted in her love of music. The Poetry Book Society selectors described her poems as "sinewy and questing, alive with memory and attentive to the interior landscape.
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Crash & Burn
In Crash & Burn, Michael O'Neill describes his treatment for cancer of the oesophagus.
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