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Life Immediately is a pacy, dynamic debut collection containing all the preoccupations of Lily Blacksell’s work, from womanhood, to music, to the natural world and our calamitous dealings with it, to the calamity and comedy of human relationships, romantic or otherwise. Blacksell’s writing showcases the expansiveness of language, but also its failures: communication builds up and breaks down, geese honk, hangovers linger, in eclectic, formally confident poems where observation is balanced with insouciance.

Jane Hirshfield is a visionary, profoundly original American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensable to many American readers in navigating their own lives. Bloodaxe published her retrospective Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems in 2005, followed by After in 2006, a Poetry Book Society Choice which was short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and then Come, Thief in 2011. Jane Hirshfield's latest collection, The Beauty, opens with a series of poems exploring both the profundities and the quirks of our shared human existence. She draws intimate meaning from multiple realms: science, culture, language itself, and above all the luminous materials and minutely particular emotions of daily life. In their robust negotiation with fate and justice, these clear and moving poems open a new and steepened understanding of our lives' full measure of losses, knowledge, and loves.

Staying Alive is an international anthology of 500 life-affirming poems fired by belief in the human and the spiritual at a time when much in the world feels unreal, inhuman and hollow. These are poems of great personal force connecting our aspirations with our humanity, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves. Many people turn to poetry only at unreal times, whether for consolation in loss or affirmation in love, or when facing other extremes and anxieties. Staying Alive includes many of the great modern love poems and elegies, but it also shows the power of poetry in celebrating the ordinary miracle, taking you on a journey around many of the different aspects of everyday life explored in poems. A strong poem is not just for crisis. Such a poem is there for all times, helping us face or embrace daily change and disruption. It will also speak to us when nothing seems to be happening, when the poem's importance is in helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves.Staying Alive has reached a wider readership than any other anthology of contemporary poetry. It is a landmark in the history of literary publishing. The first in a series, Staying Alive was followed by a sequel, Being Alive (2004), a companion anthology, Being Human (2011), and by a fourth volume, Staying Human: new poems for Staying Alive (2020). These anthologies have been welcomed not only by poets but by a wide range of well-known people respected for their work in fields other than poetry – all avid readers of poetry. They want to recommend these books above all other anthologies of contemporary poetry.

Fragmented and forgotten, the women poets of ancient Greece and Rome have long been overlooked by translators and scholars. Yet to Antipater of Thessalonica, writing in the first century AD, these were the 'earthly Muses' whose poetic skills rivalled those of their heavenly namesakes. Today only a fraction of their work survives - lyrical, witty, often innovative, and always moving - offering surprising insights into the closed world of women in antiquity, from childhood friendships through love affairs and marriage to motherhood and bereavement.Josephine Balmer's translations breathe new life into long-lost works by over a dozen poets from early Greece to the late Roman empire, including Sappho, Corinna, Erinna and Sulpicia, as well as inscriptions, folk-songs and even graffiti. Each poet is introduced by a brief bibliographical note, and where necessary her poems are annotated to guide readers through unfamiliar mythological or historical references. In an illuminating introduction, Josephine Balmer examines the nature of women's poetry in antiquity, as well as the problems (and pleasures) of translating such fragmentary works. Classical Women Poets is a complete collection for anyone interested in women's literature, the ancient world, and - above all - poetry. It is a companion volume to Josephine Balmer's edition Sappho: Poems and Fragments, also published by Bloodaxe.

Harry Martinson (1904-78) sailed the oceans from 1920 to 1927 as an escape from an unhappy childhood in rural southwest Sweden. Returning to his native tracts, he devoted himself to writing and eventually became one of the best-known authors of his time, his books appealing widely both to academics and to the general reader. His election to the Swedish Academy in 1949 was seen as a gesture towards a generation of more or less self-educated working-class writers, and he shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Literature with novelist Eyvind Johnson. Sections of the Swedish press responded with such vehemence to the way Academicians had rewarded two of their own that Martinson vowed never to publish again, and his last years were darkened by despair and depression as his view of the world became bleaker. His books reflect his upbringing, his travels and his interest in science and social questions. His poetry has many strands but the one most often admired is that which combines close scrutiny of the small events of the natural world with an intense awareness of cosmic distances in time and space. While his prose books have reached a wide readership in several languages, Martinson's poems have appeared only sporadically in English. Robin Fulton's translations provide the first substantial selection of Harry Martinson's poetry for English-language readers. His edition has an introductory essay by Staffan Soderblom, was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and won him the Bernard Shaw Prize for Swedish Translation.

J.H. Prynne is Britain’s leading late Modernist poet. His austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language. Not since the late work of Ezra Pound and the Maximus series of Charles Olson have the possibilities of poetry been so fundamentally questioned and extended as they are in the life work of J.H. Prynne. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. Four further collections were added to the second edition of Poems in 2005, followed by a further seven along with a group of uncollected poems to the third edition of Poems (2015). The decade since Poems (2015) has been the most productive period of Prynne's life, with over thirty limited editions published between 2017 and 2024. To have added these to a fourth edition of Poems would have more than doubled the size of that volume. Poems 2016–2024 is therefore a separate, supplementary edition of his later work, including, except for minor corrections, the mostly unchanged contents of 36 texts written since Poems (2015), from Each to Each (2017) to Alembic Forest (2024), including the corrected 2023 text of At Raucous Purposeful (2022). The 26 Impromptus comprising Memory Working, originally published by Face Press in three separate editions in 2020 and 2021, appear here as a complete sequence. Prynne's most productive decade has also seen the publication of three prose works, Graft and Corruption: Shakespeare's Sonnet 15 (2015/2016), Apophthegms (2017) and Whitman and Truth (2022), along with editions of Prynne's correspondence with Charles Olson (2017) and Douglas Oliver (2022). His two-volume Collected Prose is forthcoming from Oxford University Press (New York).

J.H. Prynne is Britain's leading late Modernist poet. His austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language. Not since the late work of Ezra Pound and the Maximus series of Charles Olson have the possibilities of poetry been so fundamentally questioned and extended as they are in the life work of J.H. Prynne. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. Four further collections were added to the second edition of Poems in 2005. This expanded third edition of Poems (2015) includes the complete texts of his later work: Refuse Collection (2004), To Pollen (2006), STREAK~~~WILLING~~~ENTOURAGE~~~ARTESIAN (2009), Sub Songs (2010), Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is (2011), and Al-Dente (2014), all previously available only in limited editions.

Jane Hirshfield is a visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations of our shared and borrowed lives, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. In an era of algorithm, assertion and induced distraction, Jane Hirshfield’s poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness.The Asking includes work from her earlier retrospective, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions (2005), as well as drawing upon four later collections, After (2006), Come, Thief (2012), The Beauty (2015) and Ledger (2020), along with a selection of 29 new poems. It is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The book takes its title from the close of one of those new poems: ‘don’t despair of this falling world, not yet / didn’t it give you the asking’.Interrogating language and life, pondering beauty amid bewilderment and transcendence amid transience, Hirshfield offers a signature investigation of the conditions, contradictions, uncertainties and astonishments that shape our existence. A leading advocate for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination, she brings to both inner and outer quandaries an abiding compass: the choice to embrace what is, to face with courage, curiosity, and a sense of kinship whatever comes.In poems that consider the smallest ant and the vastness of time, hunger and bounty, physics, war and love in myriad forms, this collection brings the insights and slant-lights that come to us only through poetry’s arc, delve and tact; through a vision both close and sweeping; through music-inflected thought and recombinant leap.With its quietly magnifying brushwork and numinous clarities, The Asking expands our awareness of both breakage’s grief and the possibility for repair.

From the natural world to war and politics, from memories of childhood to bittersweet snapshots of everyday life, from wry asides to fantastical flights of narrative fantasy - Kona Macphee applies her versatile and polished technique to a characteristic diversity of themes in her second book of poems. Her eclecticism is never more apparent than in the Book of Diseases sequence, which launches from its simple premise into a delirious medley of forms and subjects. The meticulously crafted lyrical poems of Perfect Blue reflect the growing power of a distinctively original, musical and compassionate voice that laments the transience and fragility of life while celebrating the joy of truly living it. Winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

Esther Jansma is a leading Dutch poet as well as an influential archaeologist. Interweaving a dazzling variety of strands, her poetry explores time and memory, past and present, death, loss, decay and legacy, and yet draws fresh power from these perennial themes because she writes from two opposite but complementary viewpoints. As an archaeologist she refined a technique for establishing the age of wooden artefacts from growth-rings in the wood which could be applied to timber from The Netherlands. Lending a voice to the past, making time visible in all its aspects, is also what she does in her poetry. The philosophical is earthed in the everyday, the mythic intertwines with the mundane, the word with the world. In her early work, the voices of the past are heard from bewildering years: as a child, the death of a father, then as a mother, the loss of a child. Her later poetry is less personal but more compelling as her poetic universe expands, embracing the whole world.

"Soul Food" is a feast of thoughtful poems to stir the mind and feed the spirit. Drawn from many traditions, ranging from Rumi, Kabir and Blake, to Rilke, Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan, this wide-ranging selection includes enormously varied work by celebrated contemporary poets such as Jane Hirshfield, Denise Levertov, Thomas Merton and Mary Oliver, as well as by many lesser-known writers from all periods and places. The anthology opens with a series of poems on human life and spiritual sustenance, starting with Rumi: 'This being human is a guest house./Each morning a new arrival...'. The poems which follow explore many ways of keeping body and soul together, offering food for thought on knowing yourself, living with nature, who or what is God...All are universal illuminations of the meaning of life, speaking to readers of all faiths as well as to searchers and non-believers. "Soul Food" shows how poetry can help feed our hunger for meaning in times of spiritual starvation.

When she died in poverty at 31, Edith Södergran had been dismissed as a mad, megalomaniac aristocrat by most of her Finnish contemporaries. Today she is regarded as Finland’s greatest modern poet. Her poems – written in Swedish – are intensely visionary, and have been compared with Rimbaud’s, yet they also show deep affinities with Russian poetry, with the work of Blok, Mayakovsky and Severyanin in particular. Born in 1892 of a Finno-Swedish family, Edith Södergran grew up in Raivola, a village on the Russian border, but was educated at a German school in St Petersburg. Her early influences were Goethe and Heine, and she wrote first in German. The driving force of Edith Södergran’s mature Swedish poetry was her struggle against TB, which she contracted in 1908. For much of her short life she was a semi-invalid in sanatoria in Finland and Switzerland. Her last years were spent amid the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and in desperate poverty in Raivola, where she died in 1923. Edith Södergran saw herself as an inspired free spirit of a new order, a disciple on her own terms of Nietzsche, then of the nature mystic Rudolf Steiner, and ?nally of Christ. But her voice is subtle and wholly original. It transcends the limits imposed by her illness to make lyrical statements about the violence and darkness of the modern world – imagistic poems that are alarming in the surreal beauty of their fragmentary diction.David McDuff’s edition was the first complete translation into English of Edith Södergran’s Swedish poetry. His versions adhere as closely as possible to the spirit and the letter of the Swedish original. In his introductory essay David McDuff gives a comprehensive and illuminating account of Edith Södergran’s life and work.

Fleur Adcock’s lively translation of this selection of medieval Latin lyrics was first published in 1983, revealing many poetic treasures hidden in for centuries in scholarly obscurity. The poems are about birds – particularly the nightingale – and young women. Most are by monks or clerics, and most are rather rude. Several are by Peter of Blois, a scholar and diplomat who turned to religion in his later years and disclaimed the brilliant erotic verses of his youth. The middle section of the book presents a selection of poems by this highly accomplished and entertaining writer - who was political secretary to Henry II and later to his widow Eleanor of Aquitaine. Many of the poems were rhymed, unlike classical Latin poetry, and wherever possible Fleur Adcock has attempted to reproduce the form and rhyme-scheme of the original. In these ratty and lively translations Fleur Adcock combines classical scholarship with her own poetic flair and technical skill. The Latin poems are printed alongside her verse translations.

Tony Harrison's v. was written during the Miners' Strike of 1984-85 when he visited his parents' grave in a Leeds cemetery and found it vandalised by obscene graffiti. In the book-length poem, he confronts the foul-mouthed skinhead thug responsible, who becomes a foil for his own anger and alienation. The political and media reaction to v. would make a book in itself. This is that book. As well as Tony Harrison's poem and Graham Sykes's photographs, this new edition of v. includes press articles, letters, reviews, a defence of the poem and film by director Richard Eyre, and a transcript of the phone calls logged by Channel Four on the night of the broadcast. Channel Four’s film of v. won the Royal Television Society’s Best Original Programme Award.The Star: 'A plan to televise a poem packed with obscenities caused outrage last night. ITV chiefs intend to screen a reading of Tony Harrison's verse v. which is full of four-letter words.'Daily Mail: A torrent of four-letter filth… the most explicitly sexual language yet beamed into the nation's living rooms… the crudest, most offensive word is used 17 times.'Gerald Howarth, MP: 'It is full of expletives and I can't see that it serves any artistic purpose whatsoever.'Mary Whitehouse: 'This work of singular nastiness.'Sir Harold Pinter: 'The criticism against the poem has been offensive, juvenile and, of course, philistine. It should certainly be broadcast.'Sir Richard Eyre: 'If I had the slightest influence over educational policy in this country, I'd see that v. was a set text in every school in the country, but of course if we lived in that sort of country, the poem wouldn't have needed to be written.'

In the two world wars – and throughout the Troubles in Northern Ireland – poets insisted on not serving any political or nationalist case. As the war poets were attacked for failing to write their country’s battle hymns, so the Ulster poets were victims of improper ‘expectations’. In this seminal critical study Edna Longley argues that while poets as citizens may support various causes, poets as writers cannot settle for anything less than ‘full human truths’. The price of that imaginative freedom is ‘eternal vigilance’.Edna Longley shows how Edward Thomas wrote for England, but not for its war. How Keith Douglas kept a moral eye on his subject even as he shot to kill. And yet how an unjust Ulster ‘hurt’ Seamus Heaney into poetry.Edna Longley relates contemporary Northern Irish poetry to the overall history of 20th-century poetry in English. She argues that the most important poets have stuck quite deliberately to their armoury of difficult traditional forms, adapting and extending them in response to modern wars, conflicts, oppression and injustice. In this important collection of interconnected essays, she also traces the influence of W.B. Yeats, and considers the work of Louis MacNeice, Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon.

In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Gwyneth Lewis's three lectures explore the connection linking form and politics with the content of poetry while exploring how each of these changes our understanding of time. She argues that the poet steers a path between making music and making sense - not at the level of the line, but in the deep structures of meaning which are poetry's terrain. The accuracy of what they say is just as important as its expression, both for their own well-being and for its worth to the reader. Taken together, her lectures begin to posit not the science in poetry but a science of the art form. 'The Stronger Life': Much has been made of the volatility of poets, which is largely a myth. Because it can be "confessional", poetry is often assumed to be therapeutic, but it can, equally, be toxic. The lives and work of poets are distinct but not unrelated. Using examples from Laura Riding and George Herbert, Gwyneth Lewis argues in this lecture that poets are more, not less resilient than the rest of the population. Looking at her own modern epic, A Hospital Odyssey, she questions how form is essential to health. 'What Country, Friends, is This?': Using Illyria in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as a starting point, this lecture explores language politics and writing, describing how far poets will go to negotiate safe passage between one and the other. Fluent in Welsh and English, Gwyneth Lewis reflects on writing in two opposed traditions at the same time and reflects on what light the work of poets such as Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Anne Carson, among others, throws on the nature of poetry as a whole. 'Quantum Poetics': Form is the science of poetry. Because of its peculiar relationship with time, poetry's history isn't linear. Language works with a quantum indeterminacy. With special reference to the early Welsh tradition's extreme formalism, Gwyneth Lewis discusses in this lecture how what seems like ornament conjures probability waves into being, adding an extra, unheard, dimension to the sound of metre.

A new child should mean new hope. But what if that's no longer so? Ailbhe Darcy's second collection unfolds in an intimate world, in which the words home and love dominate. But the private world is threatened by a public one. Written in the American Rust Belt, in an era of climate change and upheaval, Insistence takes stock of the parent's responsibility to her child, the poet's responsibility to the reader, and the vulnerability of the person in the face of global crisis. In a long poem, Darcy revisits Inger Christensen's 1981 Alphabet, a work which expresses the heart-sickening persistence and proliferation of beauty after Hiroshima. In Darcy's 'Alphabet', the spiralling form takes over, insisting on hope. But this is a doubtful sort of hope: hope for life on earth, not necessarily human life. Stink bugs work their way across America, cockroaches waltz, and quixotically-named mushrooms rise from the earth in this flirtatious but volatile collection. Described by David Wheatley as 'boldly overhauling the received categories of the Irish poem' with 'cunning and humour', Ailbhe Darcy's poems interrogate cosmopolitanism as much as they do rootedness, love as much as grief. Ailbhe Darcy's first collection, Imagininary Menagerie, was published by Bloodaxe in 2011.Insistence won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2019, the Roland Mathias Poetry Award, and the Pigott Poetry Prize 2019 in association with Listowel Writers' Week, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2019 and the T.S. Eliot Prize 2018.

Maura Dooley's poetry is remarkable for embracing both lyricism and political consciousness, for its fusion of head and heart. These qualities have won her wide acclaim. Helen Dunmore (in Poetry Review) admired her 'sharp and forceful' intelligence. Adam Thorpe praised her ability 'to enact and find images for complex feelings...Her poems have both great delicacy and an undeniable toughness...she manages to combine detailed domesticity with lyrical beauty, most perfectly in the metaphor of memory ' (Literary Review). The Silvering is her first new collection since Life Under Water, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2008. Looking in, looking out, looking through are the recurring perspectives offered by these poems. These are poems interested in shifting light and what it reveals, reflects or conceals and especially, perhaps, in what remains 'caught in the silvering'. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

The poems of Beyond take the reader back to the optimism Sarah Wardle found as a youth when she left home and became involved in the world. They show her venturing forth again, embracing life to find that all was never lost, as she finally overcomes obstacles to hope and allegations of disability she had almost allowed herself to think were insurmountable and true. The book traces her rediscovery of agency, direction, energy and love, and charts her course once more into the future. It chronicles her journey out of a care system into which she should never have let herself get deeper and deeper locked, and will give hope to others who wish to finance and negotiate their way out of this trap to take responsibility for their own lives. As in her previous collections, Fields Away, Score! and A Knowable World, the setting of many of these poems is London, but in these pages she gains an appreciation and understanding of the variety this city witnesses and offers as never before. Beyond is an affirming book: even as the flesh begins to age, the heart grows in courage and enthusiasm, reinvigorated by the realisation of the fresh possibilities of effort and resilience, confidence and self-belief, commitment and conviction, mutual trust and shared affection, and the work to be done before we sleep.

Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, David Constantine's poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. Many of the poems in his latest collection spring from particular localities: Scilly, the North of England, Southern France, the Aegean, Wales; others from certain places (loci) in literature and mythology. Inspired by such 'local habitations' and the people who live there, the poems of Elder express gratitude and loyalty, but also grief at every harm and death. Published on his 70th birthday, David Constantine's tenth book of poetry sounds many personal elegiac notes as well as - in the story of Erysichthon, for example - anxiety at the abuse of Earth, but there is also much celebration of love, beauty and the hope and aspiration in human beings to live well in the time allowed.

Vidyan Ravinthiran's much-anticipated first collection contains many poems about Sri Lanka which fuse politics, personal history and myth, yet his voice pitches itself not so much halfway between East and West as between emotional forthrightness and linguistic exuberance. Traditional forms - of culture, of verse - contend with brusquer impulses in an era of technological distortion; without taking himself too seriously, the poet asks if perhaps we don't take ourselves seriously enough. These are poems of impassioned intelligence, which refuse to separate thought and feeling and seek not only to delight and disturb but to work through difficult problems. The intricacies of the modern relationship - the smallest society, a haven of two - are reconnected with the historical world; translations, some from classical Tamil, ask how close two languages or two people can get. Indeed, Grun-tu-molani is concerned throughout with a range of human behaviours common to different societies - the need to assert oneself, save face, explain, and touch; the last of which would not be possible were it not for the distances between us.

War never stops. There have been two world wars since 1914 lasting for ten years, but wars have continued for a hundred years since then in many parts of the world: wars between nations, tribes and factions, wars over religion and beliefs, wars fought for land or oil or history, civil wars, political wars, and the Cold War when the West remained on a war-footing while supposedly at peace. This anthology presents poems from a hundred years of war by poets writing as combatants on opposite sides, as victims or anguished witnesses. It chronicles times of war and conflict from the trenches of the Somme through the Spanish Civil War to the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust; and in Korea, the Middle East, Vietnam, Central America, Ireland, the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan and other so-called "theatres of war". There are poems from years when the world was threatened by all-out nuclear war and more recent poems written in response to international terrorism. Editor Neil Astley has selected many of the poems from his Staying Alive trilogy - the anthologies Staying Alive, Being Alive and Being Human - but has added many others from elsewhere to create this deeply moving testament to humanity caught up in a hundred years of war. Like the trilogy, this is a world poetry anthology featuring poets from a variety of nations writing from different perspectives, experiences and cultures. Where possible, the poems from each war or conflict are presented chronologically in terms of when they were written or set, building up a picture of what individual poets from different nations were experiencing at the same time, either on the same battlegrounds or in other parts of the world (including the home front), with, for example, British, French and German poets all writing of shared experiences in opposite trenches during the five-month Battle of the Somme. At different stages of each war there are also poets responding events in their own countries. For example, in just one three-month period, from August to November 1944, Polish poets join the Warsaw Uprising, Miklos Radnoti is herded on a forced march from Serbia to Hungary (where he is killed), other Hungarian poets witness deportations to camps, Dylan Thomas voices the anguish of Londoners under V-bomb attack, and Louis Simpson is a foot soldier caught up in the chaotic Battle of the Bulge. Just as the original Hundred Years' War in the 14th and 15th centuries was actually a series of nationalistic conflicts rooted in disputes over territory, so it has been in the wars fought over the past century, but with even worse suffering inflicted on countries and people subjected to warfare and mass killing on a scale unimaginable in any earlier time. And yet amidst all that horror, there are individual voices bearing witness to our shared humanity, somehow surviving the folly with defiance and hope, yet often aware that the lessons of history are rarely passed on from one generation to the next. As Germany's Gunter Kunert writes in his poem 'On Certain Survivors' in which a man is dragged out from the debris of his shelled house: 'He shook himself | And said | Never again. || At least, not right away.'

W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century – an artist who has transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. An essential voice in modern American literature, he was United States Poet Laureate in 2010-11. The Moon Before Morning is a love letter composed in a stunning rush of memory. Answering the call set forth in The Shadow of Sirius (2009), which won him his second Pulitzer Prize, Merwin extends the emotional and intellectual reach of that collection with passionate reverence for the natural world, bittersweet reflection on time’s irrevocable ravages, and equanimity informed by a lifetime of writing and practised contemplation. Merwin’s studied precision in form and language filters crisp, beautiful images through ethereal memory, forging an intense bond between the writer and a quickly transforming world. ‘When we forget,’ Merwin writes, others will remember: no action or spirit on Earth is without its infinite reverberations. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Kim Hyesoon is one of South Korea's most important contemporary poets. She began publishing in 1979 and was one of the first few women in South Korea to be published in Munhak kwa jisong (Literature and Intellect), one of two key journals which championed the intellectual and literary movement against the US-backed military dictatorships of Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan in the 1970s and 80s. Don Mee Choi writes: 'Kim's poetry goes beyond the expectations of established aesthetics and traditional "female poetry" (yoryusi), which is characterised by its passive, refined language. In her experimental work she explores women's multiple and simultaneous existence as grandmothers, mothers, and daughters in the context of Korea's highly patriarchal society, a nation that is still under neo-colonial rule by the US. Kim's poetics are rooted in her attempt to resist conventional literary forms and language long defined by men in Korea. According to Kim, "women poets oppose and resist their conditions, using unconventional forms of language because their resistance has led them to a language that is unreal, surreal, and even fantastical. The language of women's poetry is internal, yet defiant and revolutionary".'

The Sparkling Jewel of Naturism brings together three seemingly unrelated poem sequences by 'this brilliant lyricist of human darkness' (Fiona Sampson). The poems in each spark off unexpected connections and surprises, despite their contrasting concerns: jealousy in 'Doormat' (being the object of someone else's jealousy), little girls in 'Happiness Is Just a Waste of Time', and married women in 'Blowfly'. Like all of Selima Hill's work, all three sequences in The Sparkling Jewel of Naturism chart 'extreme experience with a dazzling excess' (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish.

'David Scott belongs firmly to the long tradition of parson-poets that goes back at least as far as George Herbert... For all their reticence, there is a compassion in these poems and a sense of propriety' - Norman Nicholson.Springing from ordinary events, or a picture, or an aspect of the priestly life, David Scott's beautifully restrained poems work up the detail into a moment of significance. They are rooted in an English culture which is found not only in locality, but also in understatement, and the sideways look. But his poetry has wider reverberations, exploring spirituality and ways of praying as well as momentary glimpses of meaning caught in everyday life. David Scott won the National Poetry Competition in 1978, and this new retrospective draws on all the books he has published since then, from A Quiet Gathering (1984) and Playing for England (1989) to Selected Poems (1998) and Piecing Together (2005), with the addition of a whole collection of new poems.

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before for the fall of Communism, and now her country's strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceausescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. She was co-founder and President of the Civic Alliance from 1990, an independent non-political organisation that fought for freedom and democratic change, and more recently co-founded the Memorial for the Victims of Communism. Blandiana redefines her poetics in every new book of poetry she publishes. In My Native Land A4 she recreates a land of words, water, trees, cities with abandoned churches, fallen angels that cannot find their way back to heaven, and gods that learn to roller-skate to try to reach the young who remain oblivious of their existence. She projects visionary spaces within the confines of a page - the A4 sheet of her title - which emerge out of her imagination as anguished territories in which the lyrical 'I' is compelled to draw precise, clear boundaries out of a diffuse magma of words. The poems articulate a quest for love, beauty and truth and affirm an urgent need for existential authenticity as a requisite for the redemption of the self, chronicling the struggle between a constantly deteriorating body that is learning how to die and the spirit that strives to overcome its physical constraints. My Native Land A4 contains meditations on fundamental themes such as the fragility and vulnerability of being, the inexorable toll of time, the limitations of the human condition and the correspondence between life and death within the cosmic rhythms of the universe.The print edition of My Native Land A4 only includes the English translations. The e-book with audio is a bilingual Romanian-English edition with most of the poems read in Romanian by Ana Blandiana.

Few English poets have quite Kit Wright's range. From heart-felt lyricism to blistering satire, from the ribald to the grief-stricken, his poems cover almost everything life can throw at anyone, quite literally from the sublime to the ridiculous. Entertaining and engaging, writing with wit, panache and dazzling virtuosity, Kit Wright is both a seriously funny poet and a poignant chronicler of our times. His latest collection, published on his 70th birthday, shows him young at heart and writing, as always, from the heart of England.

A gloriously diverse, revelatory selection of translations from the first ten years of the Poetry Translation Centre. 111 brilliant poems translated from 27 different languages, ranging from Arabic to Zapotec, with all the original scripts included.