Bloodaxe Books Ltd – serie

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.

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.'

Louis de Paor is one of Ireland's leading Irish-language poets, and was a key figure in the Irish language literary renaissance of the 1970s and 80s. At that time he didn't want his poetry to be translated into English, believing it should be judged solely on his own original words and 'not critically assessed through the distorting prism of English' (Pat Cotter). But living in Australia for ten years gave him a different perspective, and he began publishing his work in bilingual editions. Since his return to Ireland in 1996, he has worked closely with poets Kevin Anderson, Biddy Jenkinson and Mary O'Donoghue on English translations of his poetry, with his co-translators fully engaging with the original poem in Irish, but never publishing bilingually 'until the poems have reached their first audience among Irish speakers'. This new bilingual selection of his poetry takes its title from Gerry Murphy's haiku 'Translation and its discontents', a reminder of the more destructive aspects of translation: Stark moonlit silence the brindled cat is chewing the nightingale's tongue. Here 'the translator appropriates material from another language to sustain the appetite of his own, devouring the original in the process. The danger of suffocation has led to some unease among Irish language poets.' Keenly aware of that ever-present danger and related anxieties, he and his trio of translators have eschewed the modern fashion for so-called "versions", producing English translations which are as close as possible to the original Irish poems without sacrificing their tone, energy, clarity and lightness of touch.

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.

A land ballot was the means by which Fleur Adcock's grandparents, immigrants from Manchester during World War I, were able to bid for a piece of native bush on the slopes of Mount Pirongia in the North Island of New Zealand. Their task was to turn this unpromising acreage into a dairy farm. When things didn't work out as they had hoped much of the responsibility for running the farm and engineering their eventual escape fell on their teenage son, Adcock's father. This sequence of poems follows the course of their efforts and builds up a portrait of a small, isolated community.

Matthew Sweeney's eleventh collection of poems is haunted by mortality, by other worlds and far-flung places, by visitations and violent events like the Spanish Inquisition. The poems are imaginative riffs featuring troubling companions and troublesome thoughts: ghosts and spirits, anger and guilt, crows and horses, a runaway calf and a footballing elephant. And yet amid the outlandish adventures and macabre musings in Inquisition Lane, other notes are also sounded: the poems can be lyrical as well as exuberant, saddened as well as extravagant. Dear friends are remembered. Faith is questioned. The Catholic Church is interrogated. German monks zoom by on Harley-Davidsons and chocolate is mined by French monks beneath the Madeleine in Paris.

I May Be Stupid But I'm Not That Stupid brings together six contrasting but complementary poem sequences by ‘this brilliant lyricist of human darkness’ (Fiona Sampson) relating to family, fear, foreboding and felicity. Elective Mute is about autism and happiness; My Mother and Me on the Eve of the Chess Championships, about a mother who prefers lettuces to life; Fishtank (Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice), about a brother who is somebody else; Lambchop, about a creepy old man; The Boxer Klitschko, on finding refuge with swimming, dogs and a jovial uncle; and Helpless with Laughter, on what the parts of the body have to say about themselves. Like all of Selima Hill’s work, all six sequences in the book chart ‘extreme experience with a dazzling excess’ (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish..

Virginia Astley has been a much admired songwriter and musician since the 1980s, known for her engaging lyrics as well as for her melodious style. Now her other two passions take centre stage in this book: poetry and the River Thames. She grew up by the river's upper reaches, knew the old lock-keepers and was familiar with all aspects of the Thames and its hinterland: both the natural world and the people whose lives are intimately connected with the river. In recent years, she has returned to the Thames, working for a summer as an assistant lock-keeper, and walking its length to record and respond to its landscapes, river life and river folk as a poet and photographer. Her pamphlet The Curative Harp won Ireland's Fool for Poetry chapbook competition in 2015 and was published by Southword. The English River is her first book-length poetry collection, showing many new sides to this multi-talented artist: as poet, nature writer, storyteller and photographer. The foreword is by Peter Townshend. `Virginia's story is about the river and the people who work on it, especially those who man the locks. She captures a view of the upper reaches of the River Thames that is entirely fresh. There are glimpsed moments of the claustrophobic beauty of the wooded parts that contrast with the open expanses of uplifting countryside where the river meanders through woodland and farmland. Focussing on the professionals who work on the river, and who manage the locks and the flood plains around them, Virginia suggests - as she works as a lock-keeper's assistant - that they become almost addicted to the peace and beauty of their place of work. She herself becomes enchanted, that is certain. She makes herself vulnerable in the most romantic way, working and writing and evoking everything she sees and feels as both a storyteller and poet, and as photographer.' - Pete Townshend, musician

For the past 50 years, Mircea Dinescu has been one of Romanian poetry's most provocative and obstinately singular poets. After starting out as a writer of highly musical poetry that he spun round in his fingers with the aplomb of a magician who refuted reality, he ended up stuck in free verse, impelled mainly because of the surrealism of a world in which the label and the content of any box seldom matched. After his first gratuitous exercises when he was 22 and striving to commit himself to love poetry, he was surprised to discover that he had created a poetry of sly political allusion. He was like that communist worker employed in a factory producing bicycle parts who, stealing a tiny wheel one day, a few nuts and bolts on another, a gear, then taking home a chain and a length of pipe, until finally realising to his amazement that however he assembled these parts, instead of a bicycle the result was a Russian machine gun. The dictator at whom Dinescu shot his metaphors was eventually shot with real bullets by his own henchmen. Unlike Dinescu, those men were able to see the difference between a bicycle and a machine gun: later on, disguising themselves as anti-communists, they pedalled their bicycles into the brave new consumer society. A quarter of a century and more since the fall of communism, Mircea Dinescu still hesitates to think of himself as witness, judge or defendant. Like an agile monkey, he jumps into and out of the handbook of literature, just as into and out of the handbook of history, where he is mentioned on page 16, in the chapter entitled Revolutions. In 1989, Dinescu was liberated from house arrest by a large crowd in Bucharest who carried him triumphantly to the national television building. There he announced to his country and the world, with actor Ion Caramitru, that the dictator had fled. The country changed almost overnight from communist to capitalist, but Dinescu carried on doing what he'd always done: writing necessary poems that challenge all systems.

With the demise of the Soviet Union, Lithuania jumped from a neo-romantic modernism straight into the postmodern wasteland of unfettered capitalism. Pensions disappeared along with jobs. Everything underwent "reform". Everything was for sale. Poetry audiences went from stadium size to coffee house size. Giddy joy was followed by disillusion, anxiety, angst. Gintaras Grajauskas's poetry cannot be understood without this backdrop, for it was here that he cut his poetic teeth and became a major Lithuanian poet. He met the jarring changes around him with a wry smile, black humour, irony - all grounded in respect for the quotidian, the small, the insignificant. Reading his poems, one can laugh and grind one's teeth at the same time. We can see the influences of Polish poetry in the irony and search for meaning in a new cultural landscape. We can see the rejection of lyrical language for the prosaic, the pithy. Paradoxical, absurd, witty and observant, Grajauskas reflects a society that has seemingly lost interest in speaking for itself, for the whole. The individual is on his/her own. Life is tough, and to be alive today is to drift in uncertainty, but it is a human life that cannot sustain itself on cynicism and irony. We question, we search, and we laugh through the tears, reading his work, knowing ourselves better.

Centres of Cataclysm celebrates the fifty-year history of Modern Poetry in Translation, one of the world’s most innovative and exciting poetry magazines. Founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, MPT has constantly introduced courageous and revolutionary poets of the 20th and 21st century to English-speaking readers. Ted Hughes thought of MPT as an ‘airport for incoming translations’ - from the whole world, across frontiers of space and time. These are poems we cannot do without. The anthology is not arranged chronologically but, from a variety of perspectives, it addresses half a century of war, oppression, revolution, hope and survival. In so doing, it truthfully says and vigorously defends the human. In among the poems are illuminating letters, essays and notes on the poets, on the world in which they lived and on the enterprise of translating them.

Choman Hardi's Considering the Women explores the equivocal relationship between immigrants and their homeland - the constant push and pull - as well as the breakdown of an intermarriage, and the plight of women in an aggressive patriarchal society and as survivors of political violence. The book's central sequence, Anfal, draws on Choman Hardi's post-doctoral research on women survivors of genocide in Kurdistan. The stories of eleven survivors (nine women, an elderly man and a boy child) are framed by the radically shifting voice of the researcher: naive and matter-of-fact at the start; grieved, abstracted and confused by the end. Knowledge has a noxious effect in this book, destroying the poet's earlier optimistic sense of self and replacing it with a darker identity where she is ready for 'all the good people in the world to disappoint her'. Choman Hardi's second collection in English ends with a new beginning found in new love and in taking time off from the journey of traumatic discovery to enjoy the small, ordinary things of life. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Throughout Rake, Matthew Caley's fifth collection, it can appear as if we are glimpsing into the oblique diary of an immortal time-travelling rake, one who is seeking his 'one true beloved' through an heroic tally of amorous encounters, desperately trying to get beyond appetite - or possibly an entire pack [proper collective noun] of immortal time-travelling rakes. Or maybe someone imagining themselves to be such a rake, having drunk too many espressos. Be that as it may, what results is a series of beautifully skewed, left-field, back-handed love poems. Throughout, the forms used are equally promiscuous - tanka, sonnets, refrains, poems sifted from or alluding to Les Liaisons Dangereuses or Barthes' Lover's Discourse, versions of Baudelaire, Bonnefoy and Corbiere, an 'echo sonnet', sonnet-strings, mono-rhymers, a 'tonnet' - hybrid of sonnet and tanka - and most frequently, tanka used as a run-on stanza-unit. Throughout the boudoirs of La Belle Epoch, 80s Cold War Russia, ancient Egypt and the Wild West to London 1910 or LA in the 90s, but more often than not from these locations to the 24 hour neon of the contemporary city and back again in a micro-second - desire feeds lack [and vice-versa] yet yearns for escape.

The Verandah Poems was both a departure and a return for Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, who left her village in Jamaica to become an internationally renowned Dub poet and storyteller. This is a book of coming home and coming to terms, of contemplation rather than contention – of mellow, musing, edgy poems drawn from the life and lives around her. It was Breeze's first new collection after Third World Girl: Selected Poems (2011), and was published on her 60th birthday. Foreword by Kei Miller. With photographs by Tehron Royes.

Amali Gunasekera’s first collection was published under her former name of Amali Rodrigo. This is a book marked by a sense of being on a threshold between worlds. In South and East Asian religious symbolism, the lotus flower embodies the promise of purity and transcendence because it rises clear out of the muddy mire of its origins. It represents both abstract realms and the concrete phenomenal world. The lotus root is also an aphrodisiac. Whether the occasion of these poems are relationships, customs and superstition, war and its aftermath, the fabular or simply a piece of driftwood, they question scale, geographical and emotional distances, and our habitual gaze. At the heart of the collection are her multi-voiced Aftersongs exploring the nature of the male gaze, religious didacticism and artistic inspiration. This epigrammatic sequence is based on the ekphrastic graffiti-poems inscribed between the 8th and 10th centuries at a royal pleasure palace and fortress in Sri Lanka, addressing the frescoes of the beautiful 'cloud maidens'.

The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence is the account of a young woman's stay in the psychiatric ward of a large hospital. The only time she feels safe is when swimming; the only place, the sea, preferably underwater. Selima Hill's 17th book of poetry - her 14th from Bloodaxe - takes her back to the territory of her third book, The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness (1983), but this revisiting is quite different in style and mood. Over thirty years later, 'this brilliant lyricist of human darkness' (Fiona Sampson) is more able to chart and illuminate 'extreme experience with a dazzling excess' (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish. Shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize.

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'.

Jack Mapanje was imprisoned without trial or charge by Malawi's dictator Hastings Banda for nearly four years, chronicling his prison experiences with dogged wit in his previous books. In Greetings from Grandpa - his sixth collection - Mapanje is still effervescent, with his wry humour defiantly intact. Some treacherous African tyrants may have been deposed or died horrific deaths, leaving their snoops in exile washing cars to survive - but these are mere metaphors of another life. The narratives in Greetings from Grandpa are mellow and cheerful testimonies of the sojourn of the human spirit as it survives freedom under implausible circumstances, whether at home or in exile. Grandchildren are born, calming the nerves of exile; dear friends back home die of AIDS, unsettling gentle memories; China and Asia arrive in Africa and nobody raises a finger; greedy bureaucrats syphon billions from accountant general's coffers; but Africa marches on regardless, stubbornly celebrating life, sometimes in traditional symbols; sometimes by inventing delightful beef festivals.The collection also includes Mapanje's version of Kalikalanje, a well-known legend among the Yao speaking African peoples of Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania, whose trickster hero comes into the world endowed with knowledge of past, present, future times and events. Kalikalanje is a lover of life, freedom, peace, truth, justice, and above all, fun. His enemies try to kill him only to bring destruction on themselves instead. This age-old tale has universal appeal - and is popular with children - but its symbolic, social-cultural-political nuance makes it especially relevant in today's world of persistent liars and impostors. Jack Mapanje's previous collection, Beasts of Nalunga, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007. His earlier work - including the prison poems - is available in The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New & Selected Poems (2004).

The Delta is a densely populated place. Whole countries inhabit it, exercising their powers and authority, presenting their offers of complicity and compliance. Individuals move through the night and come upon themselves in its mirrors. Dreamers and fantasists repopulate its hidden corners: Rimbaud, Bruno Schultz, William Blake, Arthur Schnitzler and the physicist Dennis Gabor lay claim to their own visions of it. Animals gaze at their human companions who gaze back. They try to puzzle each other out, looking to climb into each other's eyes. They court each other, desire their own species, are captivated both by each other's and their own beauty. Life goes on its desultory way, finding itself between creeks and cracks. And occasionally the world does crack open. Planes crash, boats sink, weather changes, floodwaters rise, people vanish on journeys. Anxiety remains: disaster zones persist into old age and death, and into the life, death and resurrection of language itself. At the core of the book is The Yellow Room, a sequence of mirror poems contemplating the Jewishness of the poet's father. The room constricts and glows.The poem breaks up across the page at intervals then reassembles into its mirrors. Many of the poems are formal haiku sequences. They are new parts of a personal Delta. Others are in rhymed and broken stanzas. The Delta has to survive - if it survives at all - on its broken patterns. Poetry Book Society Choice.

Joan Margarit (1938-2021) was one of Spain’s major modern writers. He worked as an architect and first published his work in Spanish, but over the past four decades became known for his mastery of the Catalan language, and was Spain’s most widely acclaimed contemporary poet. The melancholy and candour of his poetry show his affinity with Thomas Hardy, whose work he translated. He was awarded both the 2019 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honour, and the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry 2019, the most important poetry award in for Spain, Portugal and Latin America. In the much praised Tugs in the Fog: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), Joan Margarit evoked the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, the harshness of life in Barcelona under Franco, and grief at the death of a beloved handicapped daughter, reminding us that it is not death we have to understand but life. In his later collection, Strangely Happy (2011), he builds an architecture of the human spirit out of the unpromising materials of self-doubt, despair and death. In Love Is a Place, which brings together the poems of three recent collections, he finds himself face to face with the prospect of his own death, while rediscovering love. 'Death is the final solitude,' he writes in 'On the ground', but the image at the end of the poem is one of hope, of love, and of home, not 'the skeleton with the scythe that Dürer engraved' but 'a brightly-lit window in a dark street.' The three collections see him moving from despair to self-knowledge, confronting his old demons with honesty and courage. Love, it seems, is not after all 'hard or far away', nor was the signal lost, because, in the poet's words,, 'Love is a place. / It endures beyond everything: from there we come. / And it's the place where life remains.'

The lively 'bears' in this playful and poignant collection will surprise you on every page. They are poems of love and death, life, loss and grief. The ephemera of popular culture is used to confront mortality, and you'll be transported from the British Library to the Alps to the International Space Station, along with a vibrant cast of Vikings, videogames and Angela Lansbury. From the ludicrous to the domestic, these profound, wry and very real bears affirm that hope may be found even in our darkest moments. Chrissy Williams has published several pamphlets, one of which was shortlisted for a Michael Marks Award. Bear is her first book-length collection.

A number of years back, our author went to seek out a book by some ancient Greek thinker - the name starting with an L, or perhaps a C - called On Delight of the Nature of Things, or maybe In Delight at the Nature of Things. Either way, it turned out the book didn't exist. Our author found lots of stuff on measuring the circumference and mass of the planet Earth, and lots of pages about salt, dirt and water, but not the book that she was looking for. So, in the end, she decided to write the book herself. And here it is, or at least a start on it: eighty-five everyday objects, concerns and states scrutinised, given a voice really, and which together make up On Delight of the Nature of Things, or In Delight at the Nature of Things, or, more simply, Santiago.

In The Insomnia Poems Grace Nichols explores those nocturnal hours when Sleep (the thief who nightly steals your brain) is hard to come by, and the politics of the day hard to shut out, never mind the lavender-scented pillow. Here memories of her own Guyana childhood mingle with the sleeping spectres of dreams and folk legends such as Sleeping Beauty. A lyrical interweaving of tones and textures invites the reader into the zones between sleep and no-sleep, between the solitude of the dark and the awakening of the light. The Insomnia Poems was Grace Nichols's first new collection since Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009). Neither that collection nor this one is included in her Bloodaxe retrospective, I Have Crossed an Ocean (2010).

Splash like Jesus brings together three contrasting but complementary, familial poem sequences by 'this brilliant lyricist of human darkness' (Fiona Sampson), Buttercup the Sloth, about mothers; Lobo-Lobo, about sisters; and Behold My Father on His Bicycle, about exactly that. Like all of Selima Hill's work, all three sequences chart 'extreme experience with a dazzling excess' (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish.

Penelope Shuttle's collection explores cities (London, Bristol) on foot and via inward exploration, drawing on architecture, history and personal memory. These are poems drawn from the flipside of experience, undermining and rebuilding syntax in order to precipitate language, and, in the main, abjuring punctuation. The poems also engage with inward exploration where both active and meditative thinking seek a vulnerable and temporary equilibrium; poems more interested in framing questions than arriving at answers. The volatile and tactile realities and delusions of being in the world direct much of the language's traffic here; there's a commingling of sadness and wry humour in Shuttle's travels through our physical and metaphysical worlds. Pared-back imagery and lyric purpose are embodied here throughout in the work of a poet who agrees with Ekbert Faas's comment: 'as soon as you have a new syntax, you have a new way of breathing, and as soon as you have that you have a new consciousness'. Will You Walk a Little Faster was Penelope Shuttle's first new book-length collection after her Bloodaxe retrospective, Unsent: New & Selected Poems (2012), and was published on her 70th birthday.

The houses and landscapes of childhood exert a strong presence in Silent in Finisterre. Recalled by name, in incantation, or described in ways that recapture their irreducible reality to a child for whom they are the totality of the world, they become a kind of memory theatre: for Jane Griffiths physical things are remembered both for their own sake and to explore how they continue to shape the self. Style impresses as much as content in her resonantly evocative poems, with sentences played against line breaks to create constant small disruptions of the expected sense, while predictable phrases and forms of words are summoned only to be rewritten. Here language is not a transparent means of conveying a message but a medium that - no less than charcoal or oil paint - materially affects what is expressed through it. Form and subject are as inextricably entwined as 'the echo of port in the night's starboard, / the terra firma that is silent in Finisterre'. Jane Griffiths' Another Country: New & Selected Poems was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2008, and followed by Terrestrial Variations in 2012. Silent in Finisterre shows her extending her explorations of people and place with delight at being in the world, despite the threat of loss. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

In these restlessly exploratory poems and sequences, the space between things is never empty, but alive with messages. Utterly physical even when it is at its most enquiring, Philip Gross's latest collection contemplates space and sound. Even silence reveals itself as multiple and individual. With each book in his ambitious series since The Water Table, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, Gross has taken a new step in mapping where we live, in between language and the world. A Bright Acoustic looks at and way beyond the human, to a generously environmental view of the self in its relationships, at the same time playful and profound.