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Of Mutability
by Jo ShapcottJo Shapcott's award-winning first three collections, gathered in Her Book: Poems 1988-1998, revealed her to be a writer of ingenuous, politically acute and provocative poetry, and rightly earned her a reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation. In Of Mutability, Shapcott is found writing at her most memorable and bold. In a series of poems that explore the nature of change - in the body and the natural world, and in the shifting relationships between people - these poems look freshly but squarely at mortality. By turns grave and playful, arresting and witty, the poems in Of Mutability celebrate each waking moment as though it might be the last, and in so doing restore wonder to the to the smallest of encounters.
Human Chain: Poems
by Seamus HeaneySeamus Heaney's new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present - the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. Human Chain also broaches larger questions of transmission, as lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems which stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other 'hermit songs' which weigh equally in their balance the craft of scribe and the poet's early calling as scholar. A remarkable sequence entitled 'Route 110' plots the descent into the underworld in the Aeneid against single moments in the arc of a life, from a 1950s adolescence to the birth of the poet's first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas for the dead - friends, neighbours and family - which is yet wholly and movingly vernacular. Human Chain also adapts a poetic 'herbal' by the Breton poet Guillevic - lyrics as delicate as ferns, which puzzle briefly over the world of things which excludes human speech, while affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a self-sufficiency in which we too are included.Human Chain is Seamus Heaney's twelfth collection of poems.
Maggot: Poems
by Paul MuldoonIn his eleventh full-length collection, Paul Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are 'sex and the dead', Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no accident that the centerpiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its 'subject' the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal car accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title-sequence but many of the round-songs that characterize Maggot and has led Angela Leighton, writing in the TLS, to see these new poems (on their earlier appearance in Plan B, an interim volume which included several of the poems in Maggot) as giving readers 'a thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish.'
Night
by David HarsentAmong the poems that open Night, David Harsent's follow-up to his Forward Prize-winning collection Legion, is a startling sequence about a garden - but a garden unlike any other. It sets the tone for a book in which the sureties of daylight become uncertain: dark, unsettling narratives about what wakes in us when we escape our day-lit selves to visit a place where the dream-like and the nightmarish are never far apart. The book culminates in the seductive and brilliantly sustained 'Elsewhere', a noirish, labyrinthine quest-poem in which the protagonist is drawn ever onward through a series of encounters and reflections like an after-hours Orpheus, hard-bitten and harried by memory.
Love's Bonfire
by Tom PaulinTom Paulin's first collection since The Road to Inver in 2004, Love's Bonfire sets poems about early life and marriage beside up-to-the minute and minutely registered perceptions of post-settlement Ireland. At the book's centre are delicately inward versions of the contemporary Palestinian poet Walid Khazendar, which resonate with the proximity of other lives, other exiles and destinies, as of an autobiography by other means.
Farmers Cross
by Bernard O'DonoghueThe book brings together subtle and moving meditations on exile and belonging, travel and home, and honours many friends and loved ones along the way. In a series of poems that frequently recall the south-west Ireland of the author's childhood, Farmers Cross shows the author writing at his visionary and lyrical best.
Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis (Poetry Ser.)
by Philip LarkinFor the first time, Faber publish a selection from the poetry of Philip Larkin. Drawing on Larkin's four collections and on his uncollected poems. Chosen by Martin Amis.'Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh - or, in that curious phrase, "laugh out loud" (as if there's another way of doing it)? Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom?... Larkin, often, is more than memorable: he is instantly unforgettable.' - Martin Amis
Selected Poems
by Christopher ReidChristopher Reid won the Hawthornden Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award for his first collection, Arcadia, and has since then adopted a variety of guises: as 'Martian' poet, as Katerina Brac - she being the fictional Eastern European poet of whose work his collection of the same name purports to be translations - and as Alfred Stoker, the 100-year-old visionary. Included here as well are poems from Reid's powerful and moving elegiac volume, A Scattering, which was named Costa Book of the Year for 2009. This is an essential introduction to the work of a richly resourceful poet engaged in what he himself once described as 'provisional negotiations with untidy life'.
Six Children
by Mark Ford'Though unmarried I have had six children,' Walt Whitman claimed in a letter late in his life. The title poem of Mark Ford's third collection imagines the great poet's getting of these mysterious children, of whom no historical trace has ever emerged. Conception and extinction dominate this extraordinary new volume from one of the country's most exciting poets; it includes a lament for the passing of the passenger pigeon, a sestina on the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya (where the poet was born), a chance encounter with a seventy-year-old Hart Crane in Greenwich Village, an elegy for Mick Imlah (whose Selected Poems Ford has edited for Faber), and a moving tribute to that weirdest of religious sects, the Münster Anabaptists. Six Children is Ford's most formally varied and historically wide-ranging volume. It is sure to win many new admirers for a poet whose work has been championed by such as Helen Vendler, John Bayley, Barbara Everett, and John Ashbery.
Selected Poems of Mick Imlah
by Mick ImlahMick Imlah's second and long-awaited collection The Lost Leader was published to acclaim in 2008, shortly before his early death in January 2009. The present retrospect connects the work of three decades, drawing upon Imlah's earlier full-length collection, Birthmarks (1988), but also including uncollected poems and previously unpublished work. The Lost Leader won the Forward Prize and revealed a poet of dazzling virtuosity, eloquence and subtlety - breaking through, as Imlah said of Edwin Muir (whose poems he selected in his last year) 'to a field of unforced imaginative fluency and an unexpected common cause'. Edited by Mark Ford and with an essay by Alan Hollinghurst, the Selected Poems brings together the best work of a poet who can now be seen, with increasing clarity, as a 'lost leader' of Scottish poetry in our time.
Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968–2011
by James FentonWinner of both the Queen's Gold Medal and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, James Fenton has given readers some of the most memorable lyric verse of the past decades, from the formal skill that marked his debut, Terminal Moraine, to the dramatic and political monologues of The Memory of War and Children in Exile, through to the unforgettable love poems of Out of Danger and his most recent work: Poems is an essential selection by, as Stephen Spender put it, 'a brilliant poet of technical virtuosity'.Don't talk to me of love. I've had an earfulAnd I get tearful when I've downed a drink or two.I'm one of your talking wounded.I'm a hostage. I'm maroonded.But I'm in Paris with you.From 'In Paris With You' by James Fenton
Memorial: A Version Of Homer's Iliad
by Alice OswaldMatthew Arnold praised the Iliad for its 'nobility', as has everyone ever since -- but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its 'bright unbearable reality' (the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's glance. 'The Iliad is an oral poem. This translation presents it as an attempt - in the aftermath of the Trojan War - to remember people's names and lives without the use of writing. I hope it will have its own coherence as a series of memories and similes laid side by side: an antiphonal account of man in his world... compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which was never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as if its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking.' - Alice Oswald
Family Values
by Wendy CopeFrom a motorway service area to her ambivalent relationship with religion, Wendy Cope covers a wide range of experience in her new collection. Her mordant humour and formal ingenuity are in evidence, even as she remembers the wounds of a damaging childhood; and in poems about love and the inevitable problems of aging she achieves an intriguing blend of sadness and joy. Two very different sets of commissioned poems round off a remarkable volume, whose opening poem sounds clearly the profound note of compassion which underlies the whole.
The Song of Lunch
by Christopher ReidLunch in Soho with a former lover - but Zanzotti's is under new management, and as the wine takes effect fond memories give way to something closer to the bone. A mock-elegy for the heady joys of old-time Soho, The Song of Lunch displays the full range of Christopher Reid's wit, craft and human sympathy.
Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas
by Matthew HollisEdward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of First World War poets. Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of his final five years, centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and Thomas's fatal decision to fight in the war.The book also evokes an astonishingly creative moment in English literature, when London was a battleground for new, ambitious kinds of writing. A generation that included W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke were 'making it new' - vehemently and pugnaciously. These larger-than-life characters surround a central figure, tormented by his work and his marriage. But as his friendship with Frost blossomed, Thomas wrote poem after poem, and his emotional affliction began to lift. In 1914 the two friends formed the ideas that would produce some of the most remarkable verse of the twentieth century. Their writing was far more than just war poetry, but it was World War I that put an ocean between them. Frost returned to the safety of New England while Thomas stayed to fight for the Old.It is these roads taken - and those not taken - that are at the heart of this remarkable book, which culminates in Thomas's tragic death on Easter Monday 1917.
Jubilee Lines
by Carol Ann DuffyTo mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II's accession to the throne, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy brings together a dazzling array of contemporary poets (sixty in fact) to write about each of the of the sixty years of Her Majesty's reign. Celebrated writers as Simon Armitage, Gillian Clarke, Wendy Cope, Geoffrey Hill, Jackie Kay, Michael Longley, Andrew Motion, Don Paterson and Jo Shapcott, alongside some of the newest young talent around - address a moment or event from their chosen year, be it of personal or political significance or both. Through a series of specially commissioned poems, Jubilee Lines offers a unique portrayal of the country and times in which we have lived since 1952, culminating in an essential portrait of today: the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, the way we honour and remember. Brilliantly introduced and edited by Carol Ann Duffy, Jubilee Lines is an unforgettable commemoration: not only a monarch's reign but of a way of living for generations of her peoples.
The Map and the Clock: A Laureate's Choice of the Poetry of Britain and Ireland
by Carol Ann Duffy Gillian ClarkeCurated by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales, this new anthology gathers from centuries of essential poems. The editors have drawn on the rich languages of these islands, starting with the very first poets whose names we know - Taliesin and Aneirin, who composed in Welsh and Old Brythoneg in what is now Scotland - 'to begin at the beginning', to explore the poetry of Ireland and the British Isles in order to tell our story across the ages in this beautiful, vital treasury.
The Poetry of Simon Armitage: A Study Guide for GCSE Students
by Tony ChildsSimon Armitage is one of the leading poets of his generation. Since his first collection, Zoom, in 1989 he has published ten full-length collections of poetry, while also writing and presenting numerous works for radio, television and film. He is now one of the poets most widely studied at GCSE examination level. This study guide to Simon Armitage's poetry will be essential reading and preparation for GCSE students and their teachers, to whose needs it has been expertly tailored. The book examines Armitage's work in just the ways that students need to think about it - in respect of how the poems are crafted in language and form, and the kinds of themes, ideas and attitudes that they reflect. It also includes sections on studying individual poems for the examination, an illuminating biography with questions and answers and sample essays.
Nessie the Mannerless Monster
by Ted HughesNessie, the Loch Ness Monster, is tired of being told that she doesn't exist. In this crackling, lolloping story in verse, Ted Hughes describes how she sets out on the road to London for an audience with the Queen...
Selected Poems of Edward Thomas (Faber Poetry Ser.)
by Edward ThomasWhen Edward Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917 his poems were largely unpublished. But in the years since his death, his work has come to be cherished for its rare, sustained vision of the natural world and as 'a mirror of England' (Walter de la Mare). This edition, drawn from Thomas's manuscripts and typescripts as well as from his published works, offers an accessible introduction to this most resonant - and relevant - of poets.'In his lifetime, he was known and loved by a very, loving few. Now, since his death, he is known and loved by very many, and yearly this is more so. There is in his poems and unassumingly profound sense of permanence. A war came and ditched him, but his poems stay with no other wounds than those which caused them.' Dylan Thomas 'A very fine poet. And a poet all in his own right. The accent is absolutely his own.' Robert Frost'The one hundred and forty poems he wrote in the last two years of his life are a miracle. I can think of no body of work in English that is more mysterious.' Michael Longley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
by Fiona SampsonIn this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature.Music, when soft voices die,Vibrates in the memory --Odours, when sweet violets sicken,Live within the sense they quicken.-- To
Remains of Elmet: Remains Of Elmet, Cave Birds And River
by Ted Hughes'The Calder valley, west of Halifax, was the last ditch of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall tothe Angles. For centuries it was considered a more or less uninhabitable wilderness, a notorious refuge forcriminals, a hide-out for refugees. Then in the early 1800s it became the cradle for the Industrial Revolution intextiles, and the upper Calder became "the hardest-worked river in England". Throughout my lifetime, since1930, I have watched the mills of the region and their attendant chapels die. Within the last fifteen years the endhas come. They are now virtually dead, and the population of the valley and the hillsides, so rooted for so long,is changing rapidly.' Ted Hughes, Preface to Remains of Elmet (1979)Ted Hughes's remarkable 'pennine sequence' celebrates the area where he spent his early childhood. It mixessocial, political, religious and historical matter - a tapestry rich in the personal and poetic investment of alandscape that both creates and is inured to its people, whose moors 'Are a stage for the performance of heaven./ Any audience is incidental.' Remains of Elmet is one of Hughes's most personal and enduring achievements.
Meet My Folks!
by Ted Hughes'Other folks get so well known,And nobody knows about my own,'Have you met my sister Jane? She's a great big crow! My Grandpa is an owler and Grandma knits jerseys for wasps! And my other Granny is an octopus...Meet Aunt Flo, Brother Bert and more extraordinary family members in Ted Hughes' irresistible Meet My Folks, his first book for children, illustrated beautifully by George Adamson.
John Donne: Life, Mind and Art
by Professor John Carey'Donne is perhaps the most intellectual of English poets, and John Carey is perhaps the most intelligent of contemporary English literary critics. The encounter, as one might expect, is fierce and enthralling... This book is sensitive, searching, powerful, exciting, provocative and witty. It is a superb achievement.' Christopher Hill, TLSJohn Donne: Life, Mind and Art is a unique attempt to see Donne whole. Beginning with an account of his life, it takes as its domain not only the whole range of the poetry, but also the sermons, the letters, the spiritual and controversial works, and such highly personal documents as the treatise on suicide. The result is a clearer picture than has hitherto emerged of one of the most intricate and compelling of literary personalities.'The one book we have needed all along... A magnificent exercise in reappraisal. I have never read a critical work which reaches as deeply inside the mind of its subject.' Jonathan Raban, Sunday Times'Carey's book is itself alive with the kind of energy it attributes to Donne.' Christopher Ricks, London Review of Books
Not Love Perhaps: Selected Poems
by A. S. TessimondArthur Seymour John Tessimond - Jack to his family, John in later life - was born in Birkenhead in 1902 and made his living as an advertising copywriter, but his true writing life was in poetry, three volumes of which he published in his lifetime: The Walls of Glass (1934), Voices in a Giant City (1947), and Selection (1958). Tessimond died in May 1962, two months shy of his sixtieth birthday, and it would fall to Hubert Nicholson, his friend and executor, to make a posthumous selection of his work including a number of uncollected and unpublished poems. Not Love Perhaps (1978) has at its heart the memorable title piece which contrasts the idea of romantic love 'that many waters cannot quench' with the notion of a mutual companionship that enables two people to 'walk more firmly through dark narrow places'.