Bloodaxe Books Ltd – serie

For twenty years Micheal O'Siadhail's beloved wife, Brid, suffered from Parkinson's disease. These love poems chronicle the last two years of her life, her death and his grief. In Love Life, now available again in his Collected Poems, he told their story of over three decades of marriage. In this sonnet sequence their love faces illness and death and sounds the depths of parting. There is a tenderness, intensity and gratitude which will resonate with those who know both love and loss.

When R.S. Thomas died in 2000, two seminal studies of modern art were found on his bookshelves - Herbert Read's Art Now (1933) and Surrealism (1936), edited by Read and containing essays by key figures in the Surrealist movement. Some three dozen previously unknown poems handwritten by Thomas were then discovered between the pages of the two books, poems written in response to a selection of the many reproductions of modern art in the Read volumes, including works by Henry Moore, Edvard Munch, George Grosz, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Graham Sutherland - many of whom were Thomas's near contemporaries. These poems are published here for the first time - alongside the works of modern art that inspired them. Thomas's readings of these often unsettling images demonstrate a willingness to confront, unencumbered by illusions, a world in which old certainties have been undermined. Personal identity has become a source of anguish, and relations between the sexes a source of disquiet and suspicion.Thomas's vivid engagements with the works of art produce a series of dramatic encounters haunted by the recurring presence of conflict and by the struggle of the artist who, in a frequently menacing world, is 'too brave to dream'. At times we are offered an unflinching vision of 'a landscape God / looked at once and from which / later he withdrew his gaze'.

The living and the dead are working side by side in John Challis’s dramatic debut collection, The Resurrectionists. Whether in London’s veg and meat markets, far below the Dartford Crossing, or on the edge of the Western world, these poems journey into a buried and sometimes violent landscape to locate the traces of ourselves that remain. Amidst the political disquiet rising from the groundwater, or the unearthing of the class divide at the gravesides of plague victims, the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest when a child is born, and something close to hope for the future is resurrected.

When knowledge is ours at the tap of a key, what is it we’re accumulating, and is it at the expense of another, more intuitive, kind of knowing?The word ‘fool’ derives from the Latin follis, one of whose meanings is ‘empty-headed person’. We can’t imagine such mindlessness but might it be possible that by ‘unknowing’ a thing we can start to see it properly? There’s a lot the fool doesn’t know – otherwise they wouldn’t be a fool. But can anyone be trusted to know anything? What can we be trusted to know?A certain apprehension runs through these poems; a low-level hum of discordance between inner and outer worlds, between the sceptical and the wondering mind. Ideas of belief and objective truth play out in various ways, often through lone figures, thinking aloud in a wilful kind of performance of being.Fool is Greta Stoddart’s fourth collection. Her third collection Alive Alive O was published by Bloodaxe in 2015.

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).

Soul Feast is a companion anthology to Soul Food, offering up a further feast of thoughtful poems to stir the mind and feed the spirit, bringing hope and light in dark, uncertain times.This book’s inspiration – Soul Food – achieved its wide popularity by word of mouth. For many thousands of readers feeling adrift in the early years of the 21st century, the poems in that book offered support and sustenance. What followed has been even more destructive and disorientating: wars, pandemic, oppression, persecution of peoples and minorities, mass migration, dishonest government, financial meltdown, and looming environmental catastrophe.Yet amidst all this there are voices of hope and healing, of love and tolerance, kindness and compassion, sanity and solace, to be heard and felt in the poems of Soul Feast. This new compilation shows how poetry can help sustain our search for meaning in times of spiritual starvation. All these poems are universal illuminations of the meaning of life, speaking to readers of all faiths as well as to seekers and non-believers.Drawn from many traditions, Soul Feast includes work by poets ranging from Lal Ded and Tukaram to Pessoa, Borges, Cummings and Langston Hughes, as well as poems by celebrated contemporary poets such as Ellen Bass, Imtiaz Dharker, Jane Hirshfield and Naomi Shihab Nye. This is a book to keep by the bedside or to keep with you when travelling.

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Come to the Cabaret - on tour somewhat erratically in the North. Sample its impassioned ballads, phantasmata, and despairing satires. The cast includes a suicidal Pict from Galloway, Morayshire's unsavoury Third Corbie, and the demented Edinburgh surgeon, Scrapie Powrie. Appearing now at the House of Fear, King Shit-Click's Palace and Bede's World. In this new collection from W.N. Herbert, the verse veers from the Whitmanic to Dunbar-like flytings, and the language lurches from Scots to English through all half-way houses. The result is a big bad anxious trip through the Information Age with one of the most various of contemporary poets. W.N. Herbert is a highly versatile poet who writes both in Scots and English. Sean O'Brien has called him 'outstanding - a poet whom nothing - including what he terms "the Anchises of the Scots Style Sheet" - will intimidate'. For Douglas Dunn, his was 'the best writing in Scots - thoughtful, studied, clever - I've seen in years'. Jamie McKendrick admired his 'vibrant' poetry, his 'ear for the sensuous music of Scots' and his 'ability to effect sudden shifts of scale that bring the human and the cosmic face to face'.

For nearly three hundred years Scotland and England were the Laurel and Hardy of nations. For nearly two hundred years The Prelude was a poem by Wordsworth. Something had to give. As Britain begins to resemble a cut-up by William Burroughs, and the heritage of Robert Burns is flushed down a lavvie in Leith, one verse-monger steps forward to do battle with (or possibly for) cultural chaos. Bill Herbert’s Laurelude is in three sections: The Laurelude is a blank verse myth about Ulverston’s Idiot Boy, Stan Laurel. Othermoor depicts a cubist version of the North where the Wild Boy himself, the late Bill Burroughs, rewrites the rules. And The Madmen of Elgin squashes both Lost Boys and Solitary Reapers into Middle Scots verse forms for a pre-millennial song-and-dance. Like Oliver Hardy this volume refuses to be slim: it bursts all borders, literary and political, creating a zone where the Hollywood musical meets the Jolly Beggars, where lament bumps into love lyric, where the dictionaries go to die. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

An exiled poet in an English seaside asylum… A winter night spent in the spooky penthouse suite of Ceausescu's vanished daughter… A scientist trying to calculate the heart's square root… All these figure in The Man in the White Suit, Nick Drake's first full-length collection, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. It portrays and celebrates a richly varied cast of characters whose secrets and histories are the central thread of the book, ranging from life studies of those caught out by exile from central Europe or caught up in the strange aftermath of the 1989 revolutions, to intimate love poems and portraits of those learning the arts and mysteries of dying.

Glyn Maxwell’s precocious, proli?c talent established him as one of the brightest talents to have emerged in British poetry over the past two decades. His debut collection Tale of the Mayor’s Son (1990) was a Poetry Book Society Choice. His second, Out of the Rain (1992) won him the Somerset Maugham Award. His third collection, Rest for the Wicked (1995), like his second, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He has since published several books with Faber and Picador. The Boys at Twilight lines up all the star poems from his three Bloodaxe collections. This is not just early but vintage Maxwell: the lad bursting on the scene with his strange narratives and edgy syntax, then transforming himself in the course of these three books into a modern master whose formal skills and much celebrated imaginative gifts have been surpassed by very few of his contemporaries.

Martial is alive and kicking in Brendan Kennelly's latter-day Dublin versions of the Spanish Roman poet. He is a satirist trying to define generosity, happiness and love, with scurrilous candour and piercing clarity, in brief punchy poems. But no matter how savage his attacks, he is always playful and compassionate. He is a sharp, visionary writer who knows the world about him and is in touch with the world within himself, at once bewildered, attentive and bitingly articulate. Martial Art is a book that packs a punch.

Peter Reading was one of Britain’s most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious and heartbreaking – as funny as he was disconcerting. Over four decades he became our most skilful and technically inventive poet, mixing the matter and speech of the gutter with highly sophisticated metrical and syllabic patterns to produce scathing and grotesque accounts of lives blighted by greed, meanness, ignorance, phony media flimflam, political ineptness and cultural impoverishment. Each of his collections is self-contained, as carefully constructed and plotted as a novel, interweaving voices and narrative strands which can now be seen to link the 24 books which make up his Collected Poems. This was published in three volumes from Bloodaxe: Poems 1970-1984 (1995), Poems 1985-1996 (1996) and Poems 1997-2003 (2003). He subsequently produced two later collections, -273.15 (2005) and Vendange Tardive (2010). He died in 2011. The collections included (in full) in Volume 3 of his Collected Poems are: Work in Regress (1997), Ob. (1999), Marfan (2000), [untitled] (2001), Faunal (2002), Civil (2002) and d (2003).

Ann Sansom’s poetry overturns the reader’s expectations. Her poems often present human dramas in which people are seen as acting out their versions of themselves in their own fictions – what Stanley Cook called ‘an authentic Northern mix of realism and imagination’. In Praise of Men and other people was her first new book for nearly a decade, a welcome return for a quietly authoritative, resiliently gritty poet whose debut collection Romance won her many admirers.

Sir Gawain & the Green Knight is a classic Arthurian tale of enchantment, adventure and romance. This splendid new translation – by one of the world’s leading poets – has already been acclaimed in America. The original poem and W.S. Merwin’s modern version are comparable in stature and imaginative power to another medieval epic, Beowulf, in Seamus Heaney’s rendering.All Camelot is merry with Christmas revelry when an enormous green-skinned knight with brilliant green clothes rides into King Arthur’s court. This giant throws down a sinister challenge: he will endure a blow of the axe to his neck without offering any resistance, but whoever delivers the fatal blade must promise to take the same in a year and a day. When the young Gawain beheads him, the Green Knight grabs hold of his severed head and makes off on horseback. The poem follows Gawain’s adventures thereafter – shockingly brutal hunts, an almost impossible seduction, and terrifyingly powerful adversaries – as he gallantly struggles to honour his promise. Capturing the pace, impact and richly alliterative language of the original Middle English text – presented on facing pages – Merwin brings a new immediacy to a spellbinding, timeless narrative written many centuries ago by a master poet whose identity has been lost to time. Modern and Middle English parallel text edition.

Tatiana Shcherbina has been described as ‘one of the most significant figures in contemporary Russian poetry’ (Kommersant’). In her recent work the elegant and ironic narrator meditates on love, disappointment and loss against the backdrop of Russia’s social collapse. Sometimes her poems take the form of overtly political statements (‘Dictatorship, democracy’), sometimes new capitalist Russia is reflected merely in the emotional plane – in a poem on lost love she claims she has paid the highest rate: cash.Whilst her themes are timeless, Shcherbina’s settings are distinctly contemporary. She writes about sitting at a computer gazing into the Microsoft Windows; her poems are full of supermarkets, printing cartridges, TV, the environment; she considers applying make-up, drinking alone, falling asleep to the sounds of films in the next room.Tatiana Shcherbina is one of a generation of Russians who have been to travel frequently in Europe. She has lived in France – and sometimes writes in French – and her Russian poetry is filled with an awareness of other ‘European’ culture. She has even been criticised for a supposedly anti-Russian stance, yet she understands absolutely what is happening in Russia and is in no way an outsider. Hers is also the stance of a woman challenging Russia’s patriarchal and chauvinist society. However, Tatiana Shcherbina’s poetry is not primarily political, but literary, and she shows great versatility in different forms and genres. Her playfully meditative essays form the perfect counterpoint to her sophisticated and self-aware poetry.Russian-English dual language edition.

Josephine Balmer's 'Chasing Catullus' ventures into border territory, the no-man's-land between poetry and translation, juxtaposing new poems with fresh versions of ancient texts, brazenly reimagining classical literature, wittily subverting epic works, overwriting the past like a palimpsest. But there is a more personal journey here too. 'Chasing Catullus' presents a dark odyssey of the soul, descending in and out of the underworls as Balmer responds to the death of her young niece from cancer, exploring difficult times and dangerous emotions with compassion and humour. The poems push back the boundaries, blurring differences between ancient and modern, familiar and unfamiliar, giving voice to contemporary loss and grief.

Cheryl Follon is a feisty new Scottish writer who presents a wild carnival of bawdy tale-telling, songs and boisterous monologues - all in a rowdy spirit of earthy celebration. The poems of All Your Talk - her first collection - are lucid and lusty, direct and daring, spiced with down-to-earth humour and a lively, often wicked wit. Rooted in ballad and storytelling traditions, she describes her poetry as 'like boiling an old turnip and straining off a contemporary soup'.

From cosmology to infidelity, gentle truth to the fiercest of fairytales, this first collection from Kona Macphee tells an outsider's story in a voice that sings with the music of language. As a coin tossed or untossed, a snowball, a course of IVF, the thread of fate weaves itself throughout the poems in Tails. Can we learn to change our destiny by releasing the hurts of the past, while still embracing our fragility and ultimate mortality? Exuberantly lyrical, occasionally bleak yet never bitter, these poems explore the ambivalence of hope in the face of loss, and the redemption to be found in celebrating the transitory.

Eva Salzman is a thoroughly modern, urban poet who writes with equal wit and precision about the natural - and unnatural world. In her sceptical, restless poems, irreverent muses and relentless twins take on sharply contemporary subjects: society, the unreliability of memory and - especially - identity, gender and love, sexual or otherwise. Born in New York, Eva Salzman moved to Britain in 1985, and four books later has firmly established herself as one of our most irrepressible and necessary poets. Double Crossing includes many new poems as well as selections from collections including The English Earthquake, Bargain with the Watchman and One Two. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

"Extreme of Things" is a large collection combining new poems with a thematic selection from recent books. It explores the duality of existence, a track which runs through all Jenny Joseph's work, whether for children or adults, in poetry or prose. This new book continues her attempt to present "how things work" at the core, at the edge. It begins with poems from her last two collections, "Ghosts and Other Company" (1995) and "All the Things I See" (2000), which lead to the body of new and previously uncollected poems in the second part. The "'Season Songs' from Persephone" (1986), her long out-of-print fictional work, are here reprinted as a bridge or interlude between the two main parts.

From London's hospital wards to rural Italy and the Great Plains, Sally Read's first collection eulogises the emotional and physical borders we cross, whether in sexual surrender, the squeezing of a trigger, or the point at which skin is pierced by a needle. What results appeals to the thresholds at which we succumb to desire, love, or grief. Yet, ultimately, there is tenderness and acceptance as she considers what breaks us, and what binds.

Piotr Sommer is one of Poland’s leading poets. Continued extends and enlarges the achievement of his earlier Bloodaxe selection, Things to Translate, and spans his whole career to date. The translations were made with the help of leading British and American poets, including John Ashbery, Douglas Dunn and D.J. Enright.

Tatiana Voltskaia is one of Russia's leading poets, as well as a distinguished journalist and essayist. She belongs to the generation who began to write poetry seriously during the last decade of the USSR, reacting to the profound and disturbing changes of that time to emerge as the poets of the new Russia. Her subjects are the perennial Russian ones of love and death, and her work continues Brodsky's preoccupation with space and time as the vectors of our lives, echoing his vision of Russia as a crumbling empire. At the centre of her lyrical poetry there is a woman trying to escape from her condition of isolation, seeking communication through dialogue, conversations, reflections, shadows, echoes, letters and sex. Many of her poems are set in her native city of St Petersburg - often described as the Venice of the North - where water meets stone, reflections meet their images, and what is real is confronted at every turn by illusion. It is an 'artificial' city, built without native or vernacular architecture or culture: everything was borrowed and imitated to create a window on to the West, and this eclectic cultural mix where East meets West finds its reflection in Voltskaia's work. Her concern with the Western tradition of literature in Russian poetry places her firmly in the St Petersburg tradition of Pushkin, Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Brodsky and Kushner, characterised by strict verse form, intellectual themes including those from classical literature and myth, coupled with an intimate address to the reader. The same themes appear in all her work, but while in the prose Voltskaia sets these in the context of our lives and times, examining the implications they have for our society, in her poetry she explores their personal significance for the individual. Russian-English dual language edition.

Sarah Wardle was poet-in-residence with Tottenham Hotspur FC when many of these poems were written. Her Score! is a winning commentary on contemporary culture, shooting at the heart of consciousness, family, sport, the female voice and Darwinian science. Her second collection kicks off with her Spurs poems, tackling the common ground between goals of competition and community. Then X: A Poetry Political Broadcast presents poetry as a beacon of imagination, choice and responsibility: the still, small voice that guides us through life’s terrain. Score! is completed by Sheet Music, a medley of poems ranging from London to Stone Age man, Schrödinger's Cat to Nelson’s Column.

Look, Clare! Look! is the story of a year. When Clare Pollard set off on a six-month world trip, she wanted to write a long poem which engaged with what she saw and felt during her travels. On her return, she discovered that her father was seriously ill, and his funeral was held on New Year’s Eve. Clare Pollard’s third collection is a book about journeys and home. She looks closely at both global issues and the blossom in her yard. Beginning as a meditation on western guilt against the backdrop of SARS and the Iraq War, it ends by looking at our closest relationships, in poems that deal with a pregnancy scare and her engagement, as well as illness and loss.

The landscape of Polly Clark's "Take Me with You" is strange and dangerous, her narrators searching for answers to questions about the nature of human attachment and longing. Her acclaimed first book, "Kiss", took the reader on a journey into the self. In this new collection, the journey turns outwards and explores the ways in which we connect with others and the wider world. Polly Clark's characters speak in many voices, both animal and human, bringing into focus the moments when we are most alive, and most alone. The poems are unsettling even as they are compelling, taking the reader from the last performance of a virtuoso octopus, to the dizzying industry of a Chinese city, to the vast and lonely seascapes of the Scottish coast.

Passionfood is a feast of classic and contemporary love poems. There are a hundred flavours in this four-course celebration of love, passion and desire. Compiled by Staying Alive editor Neil Astley, its menu is distinctively different from that of other anthologies of love poetry. There are no broken hearts here. Passionfood is a celebration of true love - love that grows into love that lasts, love that fills every part of our lives, love that never leaves us. Passionfood opens with a starter selection of poems about attraction, desire and longing. Passion is the main course: the excitement of love, being and staying in love, including many of the greatest poems in our literature - by writers such as Shakespeare, John Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Yeats and Auden. For dessert, the book offers deliciously saucy poems by leading contemporary poets. But like love, Passionfood is a feast which doesn't have to end. The fruit that follows dessert offers still more poetry to savour: poems about deepening love and friendship, love that never leaves us, poems celebrating closeness, trust and mutual understanding, poems of joy, wisdom and shared recognition. Passionfood is a book of positive, provocative and witty love poems for everyone whose life has been nourished and sustained by love, mixing passion with food for thought. It's also a book which holds out hope, and as such, a perfect gift for the person you love, for weddings and engagements, birthdays and anniversaries.

Dan Chiasson has been hailed in America as 'one of the most gifted young poets of his generation' (Frank Bidart). This book - his first to be published in Britain - brings together poems from his first two US collections, "The Afterlife of Objects" (2002) and "Natural History" (2005), along with more recent work. His later collection, "Where's the Moon, There's the Moon", was published by Bloodaxe in 2010. "The Afterlife of Objects" is a kind of dreamed autobiography in which the enigmas of an individual mind become universal puzzles. "Natural History" takes its inspiration from Pliny's encyclopaedic "Historia Naturalis", suggesting that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders - and equally in need of a compendium of everything known.

Now is a fast and frenzied meditation on time, ageing, alienation and the pressures of living in the modern city. Each triplet in this book-length poetry sequence addresses the question: What is 'now'? With the brevity of a proverb, each three-liner offers a short, sharp perception which tries to capture or just grasp at the sliding identities of 'now', at the same time as it adds its quickfire nugget of wit or wisdom to the accumulating weight of the whole sequence. By the end of the book, Kennelly has taken us on a journey not just through time but through a dark night of the soul, through his own head and the thoughts and feelings of all kinds of people struggling to survive and find meaning in their lives. Now is published simultaneously with "When Then is Now", a trilogy of Kennelly's modern versions of three Greek tragedies which dramatise timeless human dilemmas as relevant now as they were in ancient times. All three plays - Sophocles' "Antigone" and Euripides' "Medea" and "The Trojan Women" - focus on women whose lives are torn apart by war, family conflict and despotic regimes.