#death

Every year, a large number of people living in our towns and cities - the homeless, suicides, illegal immigrants, junkies, drug 'mules', victims of crime and, above all, old people living alone - are found dead. Sometimes, they are not discovered for weeks or months, and it is often hard to ascertain who they are. Their funerals are held without relatives or friends and acquaintances being present; the only people in attendance are the pall-beares, perhaps someone from the Department of Social Services, the cemetery management and the funeral director. In Amsterdam in 2002, the poet and artist F Starik, deeply moved by the desolation of these solitary funerals, initiated 'The Lonely Funeral' project and seven years later in Antwerp, the Flemish poet Maarten Inghels set up a project of the same name.

• Paperback £11.99 £10.79 available

» More details...

Celebrated Icelandic writer Gerður Kristný's Drápa is a novel-poem which takes its form from Old Norse shield poetry and its mood from modern Nordic crime. But the poem is no fiction: it is about a real woman's murder in the city of Reykjavik, and, through this lens, about all women's deaths. This is Viking poetry at its most contemporary.

• Paperback £10.99 £9.89 available
• Hardback £13.99 £12.59 available

» More details...

In its literary impact, Montale's Xenia, published in 1966 in an edition of just 50 copies, might be described as Italy's Four Quartets.

• Paperback out of print
• Hardback out of print

» More details...

Wioletta Greg's new collection, in Marek Kazmierski's attentive and nuanced trans­lation, serves as both a moving personal testament to a family that survived, and a compelling document of a century of European history.

• Paperback £10.99 £9.89 available
• Hardback £12.99 £11.69 available

» More details...