Deceptively relaxed in tone, these verse letters - sometime serious, sometimes whimsical - are addressed to such figures as Angela Carter, the Venerable Bede and from Odysseus to Gilbert White's tortoise, on topics as diverse as smallpox and the paintings of Vermeer, landscape-gardening, the King James Bible and Eddie Stobart's lorries on the M6.
In these pages Jeremy Reed optimises his London quarter of Soho and the West End, its outlaws, opportune strangers and rogue mavericks condensed into poems coloured by an imagery that pushes pioneering edges towards final frontiers. Right on the big city moment, and with an eye for arresting acute visual detail, Reed makes the capital personal.
When David Gascoyne celebrated his seventeenth birthday in Paris in 1933, he already had a poetry collection and a novel to his name. He spent much of the next few years in the French capital associating with Eluard, Dali, Ernst, Breton, Peret and other surrealists. By the age of 20 he had firmly established himself within the movement with the publication of his groundbreaking A Short Survey of Surrealism and the poems of Man's Life Is This Meat. In 1938 Holderlin's Madness marked his move away from surrealism in 'a renewal of vision', followed by his milestone collection, Poems 1937-1942 (1943). After the war Gascoyne revisited Paris, publishing A Vagrant and other poems in 1950 and Night Thoughts, the acclaimed BBC radiophonic poem for voices and orchestra, in 1956. Despite several breakdowns he continued to write, particularly during the latter years of his long life, producing few poems, but many translations, reviews and literary criticism, memoirs and obituaries. Even so it was his contention that he was 'a poet who wrote himself out when young and then went mad'. This self-deprecating judgement could not be further from the opinion of those who knew him and valued his achievement. As his fellow poet and lifelong friend, Kathleen Raine, wrote on Gascoyne's 80th birthday: You are the chosen one To speak the words of blessing In this time. This New Collected Poems, compiled by Gascoyne's friend and editor Roger Scott, comprises work that the poet chose to preserve, together with uncollected and unpublished material; all meticulously researched from notebooks and manuscripts held in the British Library and internationally in academic institutions. It falls to present-day readers of Gascoyne's poems to experience the impact of his work, to recognize its significance in twentieth-century literature, and its continuing relevance.
The newly drawn Stanza Stones Trail runs through forty-seven miles of the Pennine region, some of the most strikingly varied landscape in the world. Simon Armitage composed six new poems on his Pennine walks and, with the help of Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver Pip Hall, found extraordinary, secluded sites and saw his words carved into stone.
Perhaps no cycle of poems in any European language has made so profound and lasting an impact on an English-speaking readership as Rilke's Duino Elegies. This translation was chosen by Phillip Pullman as one of his 40 favourite books.
In fifty-five sonnets, Rilke plays an astonishing set of philosophical and sensual variations on the Orpheus myth. 'Praising, that's it!' he declares; nature, art, love, time, childhood, technology, poverty, justice - all are encompassed in poems that spark with insight and invention, amongst the joyful and light-footed that Rilke ever wrote.
Yannis Ritsos (1909 - 1990) is one of Greece's finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. In Secret gives versions of Ritsos's short lyric poems: brief, compressed narratives that have an irresistible potency.
In this selection from five years' worth of lyrics, accompanied by recent sonnets, Paul Muldoon recalls the bardic traditions of his homeland where songs and poems exist somewhere in between Parnassus and Tin Pan Alley.
For Duffy, pictures are magical creations and recreations of the visible world - of history, mythologies, landscape, love and death - where the artists who make them attempt risk-taking feats analogous to a poet's with words.
Centred on environments - human, insect and animal - some experienced personally, some observed, some imagined. Though strictly contemporary in her concerns, she reaches back in her poetry to childhood, and beyond that in her imagination to cultural figures of the past - John Donne, Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, bringing them lucidly and vividly to life. There is a strong sense of compassion and fair play in her poems, reflecting Duffy's lifelong support for progressive social and political movements, and a beautiful lyricism and technical skill derived from her love of the classical world and Old and Mediaeval English. As so often in her work, London past and present provides the backdrop to her real and imagined life stories: of love and loss, forebears and friends, the humorous and sometimes painful experiences of old age.
Artist and poet David Jones fought in the Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres, surviving to write and paint some of the greatest modernist works on war. Now, thanks to Dilworth's painstaking research, Jones's story can be told in detail...
At the Yeoman's House centres on Bottoengoms Farm, East Anglia. The celebrated authour of Akenfield explores the building inhabited by 20th century artist John Nash. It is part of the landscape loved by Constable. Inside Bottengoms there are telling handprints and footprints everywhere, and this is their tale. A tale told by a true countryman.
Features personal poems that span a life-time as the author relives moments of childhood, or reassesses his role as son to a dying mother, or gets told how to behave by his grandson. This title is concerned with what lasts and what vanishes: dreams, memories, people and objects.
As a young girl, Jane Duran moved to Chile with her family, travelling from New York to Valparaiso on the Santa Barbara, one of the Grace Line fleet. This long journey, passing through the Panama Canal and down the Pacific coast of Latin America, has inspired her collection of poems Graceline.
Over the years the author has gained the reputation of being at the forefront of the experimental movement in contemporary British poetry. This book collects his work and includes his recent "The Odes to TL61P."
Derelict Air gathers over 400 pages of previously uncollected poetry. Complete with scholarly endnotes, manuscript facsimiles, and a cover by the painter Raymond Obermayr, this substantial offering of Edward Dorn's poetry is a must-have for any reader interested in post-War American modernism.
The peerless U. A. Fanthorpe roots herself in the very earth of English poetry, connecting herself to Hughes and Browning, but also and more pertinently to the real experience of English living... so clear-eyed and so, well, completely poetic. -Stephen Fry.
Offers a collection of poems and images published to mark the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. This title features poems that are based on the theme of enslavement.
Features a poem that vividly evokes the history of the Holocaust with precise particulars and mundane details. This title also includes poems that are akin to dramatic monologues, moving from a Lewes garden party to characters in a Brighton Terrace and thence to Krakuw.
A collection of poems, set in and around the centre of London that depict a capital both familiar and alien, peopled with figures contemporary and historical: from the residents of present-day Lambeth, to the victims of Jack the Ripper, and to those whose spirits are still embedded in the reflections of a plate-glass office window.
Features five short stories that gives ordinary events a hallucinatory strangeness and renders dreams as if they were entirely ordinary, subject to the same ethical and political judgements appropriate to the daylight world.
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