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A collection of three distinct parts, the poems in Rebecca Perry''s Stone Fruit nonetheless speak across their many common preoccupations: memory, grief, the fallibility of the physical form, our connection to and place in the world, natural and otherwise. Opening with a study of a girl in a miniature portrait, expanding into lyrical prose pieces and closing with a reflective long poem – part elegy and part reflective essay on competitive trampolining – the poems are united by a desire to pay absolute attention to both the material and inner world. The worlds within this collection appear to be teeming with life – crabs push through sand, wasps swarm on meat; and forms change – bones are replaced with metal, a human head transfigures into that of a muntjac – but there is nothing frantic in this shifting. The care taken in the poems to properly look, to focus on stillness and acts of interrogation, often gives the feeling that they are being viewed through glass, or placed in a frame. If this book could be said to have a central demand of the reader, it is to consider whether they will allow themselves to attend to the pain and joy of giving due reflection to what is happening in the world around us, in their lives and the lives of others. And what the cost of that is. Stone Fruit is Rebecca Perry’s second collection, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendtion. Her first collection Beauty/Beauty won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017. It was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize.

Basil Bunting (1900-1985) was one of the most important British poets of the 20th century. Acknowledged since the 1930s as a major figure in Modernist poetry, first by Pound and Zukofsky and later by younger writers, the Northumbrian master poet had to wait over 30 years before his genius was finally recognised in Britain – in 1966, with the publication of Briggflatts, which Cyril Connolly called ‘the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets’.

As well as Briggflatts, this edition includes Bunting’s other great Sonatas, most notably Villon (1925) and The Spoils (1951), along with his two books of Odes, his vividly realised ‘Overdrafts’ (as he called his free translations of Horace, Rudaki and others), and his brilliantly condensed Japanese adaptation, Chomei at Toyama (1932). It presents in its entirety Bunting’s own Collected Poems, with the addition of the posthumous Uncollected Poems and an introduction by Richard Caddel.

Bunting wrote that ‘Poetry, like music, is to be heard.’ His own readings are essential listening for a full appreciation of his highly musical poetry. This enhanced ebook with audio draws on audio recordings of readings given by Bunting in Britain and the US during the 1960s and 1970s, with 50 audio files embedded with the texts of the poems, including all his major works.

A separate enhanced ebook with audio and video of Briggflatts is also available from Bloodaxe, including two audio recordings of the poem from 1967 and 1977, a video of Peter Bell’s 1982 film portrait of Bunting, and additional background material.

‘Briggflatts is one of the few great poems of this century. It seems to me greater each time I read it.’ – Thom Gunn

‘His poems are the most important which have appeared in any form of the English language since T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.’ – Hugh MacDiarmid

Being Human is the third book in the Staying Alive poetry trilogy. Staying Alive and its sequel Being Alive introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry. Being Human is a companion volume to those two books – a world poetry anthology offering poetry lovers an even broader, international selection of ''real poems for unreal times''.

The range of poetry here complements that of the first two anthologies: hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world; poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit; poems about being human, about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder. There are more great poems from the 20th century as well as many recent poems of rare imaginative power from the first decade of the 21st century.

But this book is also rare in reflecting the concerns of readers from all walks of life. Such has been the appeal of Staying Alive and Being Alive that many people have written not only to express their appreciation of these books, but also to share poems which have been important in their own lives. Being Human draws on this highly unusual publisher''s mailbag, including many talismanic personal survival poems suggested by our readers.

''I love Staying Alive and keep going back to it. Being Alive is just as vivid, strongly present and equally beautifully organised. But this new book feels even more alive – I think it has a heartbeat, or maybe that’s my own thrum humming along with the music of these poets. Sitting alone in a room with these poems is to be assured that you are not alone, you are not crazy (or if you are, you’re not the only one who thinks this way!) I run home to this book to argue with it, find solace in it, to locate myself in the world again.'' – Meryl Streep

‘Truly startling and powerful poems.’ – Mia Farrow

‘These poems distil the human heart as nothing else… Staying Alive celebrates the point of poetry. It’s invigorating and makes me proud of being human.’ – Jane Campion

‘Staying Alive is a blessing of a book. The title says it all. I have long waited for just this kind of setting down of poems. Has there ever been such a passionate anthology? These are poems that hunt you down with the solace of their recognition.’ – Anne Michaels

‘Staying Alive is a magnificent anthology. The last time I was so excited, engaged and enthralled by a collection of poems was when I first encountered The Rattle Bag. I can’t think of any other anthology that casts its net so widely, or one that has introduced me to so many vivid and memorable poems.’ – Philip Pullman

‘Usually if you say a book is “inspirational” that means it’s New Agey and soft at the center. This astonishingly rich anthology, by contrast, shows that what is edgy, authentic and provocative can also awaken the spirit and make its readers quick with consciousness. In these pages I discovered many new writers, and I’ve decided I’m now in love with our troublesome epoch if it can produce poems of such genius.’ – Edmund White

‘Staying Alive is a wonderful testament to Neil Astley’s lifetime in poetry, and to the range and courage of his taste. It’s also, of course, a testament to poetry itself: to its powers to engross and move us, to its ability to challenge and brace us, and to its exultation. Everyone who cares about poetry should own this book.’ – Andrew Motion

This enhanced ebook with includes audio files of Brendan Kennelly reading his poems drawn from four classic recordings made in Dublin in 1982, 1998, 1999 and 2002. These include recordings of 32 individual poems as well asfour extracts from his book-length poem The Man Made of Rain.Brendan Kennelly is one of Ireland''s most popular and prolific poets. Over the past five decades he has written thousands of poems published in over 30 books of poetry, including three previous editions of Selected Poems. Published on his 75th birthday, this new selection presents just over a hundred of Kennelly''s most essential poems and has been edited by two lifelong admirers of his work. Like Kennelly, Terence Brown, Emeritus Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature, studied at Trinity College Dublin, and taught there for most of life. After studying at Trinity College, Michael Longley went on to become one of Ireland''s leading poets and was Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2007-10.

After the appearance of Fleur Adcock''s Poems 1960-2000 she wrote no more poems for several years. This cessation coincided with – but was not entirely caused by – her giving up smoking. When poetry returned to her in 2003 it tended towards a sparer, more concentrated style. Dragon Talk, published in 2010, reflected her continuing preoccupations with family matters and her ambivalent feelings about her native New Zealand.

Her initial inspiration was the letters her father wrote home from England to his parents during World War II, which evoked her own memories of that era. The central sequence moves from her first coming to consciousness in New Zealand up to and through the war years in Britain and on to sketches from her teens in puritanical postwar Wellington after her reluctant return – not without her usual sardonic eye for incongruities and absurdities. There are also affectionate poems for her grandchildren and her late mother.

Fleur Adcock (1934-2024) was one of Britain''s most accomplished poets. Her poised, ironic poems are tense and tightly controlled as well as shrewdly laconic, and often chilling as she unmasks the deceptions of love or unravels family lives. Disarmingly conversational in style, they are remarkable for their psychological insight and their unsentimental, mischievously casual view of personal relationships. Born in New Zealand, she explored questions of identity and rootedness throughout her work, both in relation to her personal allegiances to her native and adopted countries as well as her family history, whose long-dead characters she brings to life. She also wrote movingly of birth, death and bereavement, and has tackled political issues with honest indignation and caustic wit.

Her first Bloodaxe retrospective, Poems 1960-2000, was followed by five further collections, all of which remain available as separate editions. They are also included in full in her Collected Poems. This first complete edition of her poetry was published on her 90th birthday in February 2024, superseding her earlier retrospective, with the addition of Dragon Talk (2010), Glass Wings (2013), The Land Ballot (2015), Hoard (2017) and The Mermaid''s Purse (2021), along with a gathering of 20 new poems.

Inger Christensen (1935-2009) was both a virtuoso and a paradox. Her fiction, drama, essays and children’s books won her wide acclaim in Denmark and other European countries, but it is her poetry – spanning a forty-year period – that best reveals her versatility and depth. Her poetry reflects a complex philosophical background, yet her most complex poetic works have enjoyed wide public popularity. Many of her poems have a visionary quality, yet she is a paradoxically down-to-earth visionary, focusing on the simple stuff of everyday life and in it discovering the metaphysical as if by chance.In alphabet, Christensen creates a framework of psalm-like forms that unfold like expanding universes, crystallising into words both the beauty and the potential for destruction that permeate our world and our times.‘The ecological crisis forms the starting point for a part ecstatic homage to the world and nature, which in spite of everything is still found: partly in the active sense that it exists, partly in the passive sense that it is discovered and understood – by the poet and by us.’ – Erik Skyum-Nielsen‘Inger Christensen’s use of systems in no way inhibits the evolution of her poetry. On the contrary, it is as if the poetry comes about by virtue of the systems; as if it emerges in the interplay and friction with a random, but fixed order. In alphabet, Inger Christensen has created a system by combining the alphabet with Fibonacci’s numeric sequence, in which each number is equal to the sum of the two preceding numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 etc. alphabet is about the relationship between people and nature and, like it, is itself a form of creation. With the word exist as the pivot, the poems move – from the first wondering confirmation apricot trees exist – out into the world to life and death, the planet and calamity.’ – Christian Egesholm

George Szirtes came to Britain as an eight-year-old refugee after the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Educated in England, he trained as a painter, and has always written in English. This comprehensive retrospective of his work covers poetry from over a dozen collections written over four decades, with a substantial gathering of new poems. It was published on his 60th birthday in 2008 at the same time as the first critical study of his work, Reading George Szirtes by John Sears.

Haunted by his family’s knowledge and experience of war, occupation and the Holocaust, as well as by loss, danger and exile, all of Szirtes’ poetry covers universal themes: love, desire and illusion; loyalty and betrayal; history, art and memory; humanity and truth. Throughout his work there is a conflict between two states of mind, the possibility of happiness and apprehension of disaster. These are played out especially in his celebrated long poems and extended sequences, The Photographer in Winter, Metro, The Courtyards, An English Apocalypse and Reel, all included here.

Winner of The King''s Gold Medal for Poetry, 2024

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize (for Reel)