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If I Only Knew

Known as a poet who spoke of the history
and suffering of the Jewish people, Nelly
Sachs was, at the time she was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966, highly
regarded in her native Germany, frequently
being described as a poet of reconciliation and
healing, although whether she was is open to
debate.

Chapbook forthcoming

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The Cerulian Bird

Matilda Olkinaitė was only 19 years old
when, in 1941, she was murdered by Nazi
collaborators in her native Lithuania.

Many of the poems in this chapbook were
written in a notebook that remained
hidden for decades.

Chapbook ~~£8.00~~ £7.20 available

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Graphologies

I close my eyes and see poems
written inside my head.
I open them to copy them down.
Through photos I see
the poems with my eyes open.
These are the translations and
transcriptions of what I see.

John Kinsella

Chapbook ~~£8.00~~ £7.20 available

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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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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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Nightwalker's Song

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE was a monumental European presence – dramatist, impresario, novelist, essayist, scientist, administrator and extraordinarily prolific poet. This selection from his early and middle years includes the ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ (the title of which became famous a hundred years later through Dukas’ well-known orchestral piece) and also highlights the dramatic element in Goethe’s poetry (a speech from Faust and a monologue from an unfinished play about Prometheus). Several poems set to music by Brahms and Schubert are also featured.

John Greening’s ingenious translations offer refreshing new angles for those who are already familiar with Goethe’s poetry and are an excellent introduction for those coming to it for the first time.

Chapbook ~~£8.00~~ £7.20 available

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The Bestiary or Orpheus' Retinue

Le Bestiaire, charming verse sketches of beasts, fish, birds and insects, together with their guide and mentor, Orpheus, was Apollinaire’s first published book. It appeared in 1911, two years before his ground-breaking modernist collection Alcools. His bestiary – not modernist – harks back to a venerable tradition of animal poetry. What Apollinaire does in these single-stanza pieces is link pithy evocations of the animal world to human foibles.

Martin Sorrell’s translations offer equally pithy English equivalents of Apollinaire’s witty little morality tales, and some of Apollinaire’s own rarely-seen animal drawings are included.

Chapbook ~~£8.00~~ £7.20 available

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Evening Hour

Karl Marx is not known as a poet, although as a young law student he had dreamed of following a literary career and worked on poems, a novel and a play, before deciding that his future lay elsewhere. Marx’s major philosophical works include The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology (both co-authored with Friedrich Engels) and Capital.

Some 120 of his poems from the years 1836-7 survive; the poems in this chapbook range from those on the themes and in the style fashionable at that time, love poems to his future wife and satirical verse. Together they offer, along with Philip Wilson’s illuminating introduction, a fascinating glimpse into the mind and times of one of history’s great thinkers.

Chapbook ~~£8.00~~ £7.20 available

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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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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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