bloodaxe books ltd united kingdom tyne and wear (147 results)

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. States of Happiness, Suzanne Battys second full-length collection, begins with an extended sequence written in memory of her twin sister. This explores their relationship from shared birth to her twins early death from Friedreichs ataxia, a rare degenerative disease. Suzanne Battys gifts of empathy and imagination combine to produce a profoundly moving elegy telling the hidden story of growing up as the well twin and exploring the meaning of illness and wellness in the light of her own experiences. The collection as a whole extends her range and probes more deeply her primary concerns - the uncertainty and necessity of love and the drive to find meaning and healing through the medium of language. The search for states of happiness, no matter how fleeting, is at the heart of this collection. These are poems which move from the everyday to the visionary, in which the physical world reflects changing emotional and perceptual states. Anarchic and sensuous, they fearlessly encounter both beauty and darkness, enabling a new and deeper connection with the world. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. "People Who Like Meatballs" brings together two contrasting poem sequences about rejection by 'this brilliant lyricist of human darkness' (Fiona Sampson). The title-sequence, "People Who Like Meatballs", is about a man's humiliation by a woman. Into my mother's snow-encrusted lap is about a dysfunctional mother-child relationship. Like all of Selima Hill's books, both sequences in "People Who Like Meatballs" chart 'extreme experience with a dazzling excess' (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. A powerful and ambiguous body of water lies at the heart of these poems, with shoals and channels that change with the forty-foot tide. Even the name is fluid - from one shore, the Bristol Channel, from the other Mor Hafren, the Severn Sea. Philip Gross' meditations move with subtle steps between these shifting grounds and those of the man-made world, the aging body and that ever-present mystery, the self. Admirers of his work know each new collection is a new stage; this one marks a crossing into a new questioning, new clarity and depth. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Good. 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 Fours film of v. won the Royal Television Societys 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.'. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. In these new poems, Tony Harrison confronts the unspeakable terrors of the twentieth century. The title poem is the text of his new BBC film poem, The Gaze of the Gorgon, which takes the terrifying creature of legend who turns men to stone as a metaphor for the horrors unleashed in modern warfare. In other poems, such as The Mother of the Muses and the Sonnets for August 1945, Harrison forges his own response to these dark times through the element of fire, seeking - in the source of terror itself - the heart of eloquence and celebratory love. The book includes his powerful Gulf War poems which the Sunday Times called 'mordant masterpieces' and the Times Literary Supplement 'fierce and sardonic'. Winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead the underworld and the human living world and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage. Inside the Wave, Helen Dunmores tenth and final poetry book, was her first since The Malarkey (2012), whose title-poem won the National Poetry Competition. Her final poem, 'Hold out your arms', written shortly before her death and not included in the first printing of Inside the Wave, was added to all subsequent printings. Her posthumous retrospective, Counting Backwards: Poems 1975-2017 (2019), covers ten collections she published over four decades up to and including Inside the Wave. Costa Book of the Year 2017, winner of the 2017 Costa Poetry Award. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Fine. Large selections - with essays on their work - by eleven poets: Sylvia Plath, Stevie Smith, Kathleen Raine, Fleur Adcock, Anne Stevenson, Elizabeth Jennings, Denise Levertov, Elaine Feinstein, Jenny Joseph, Ruth Fainlight and Jeni Couzyn. GCE set text.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Hannah Lowe taught for a decade in an inner-city London sixth form. At the heart of this book of compassionate and energetic sonnets are fictionalised portraits of The Kids, the students she nurtured. But the poems go further, meeting her own child self as she comes of age in the riotous 80s and 90s, later bearing witness to her small son learning to negotiate contemporary London. Across these deeply felt poems, Lowe interrogates the acts of teaching and learning with empathy and humour. Social class, gender and race and their fundamental intersection with education are investigated with an ever critical and introspective eye. These boisterous and musical poems explore the universal experience of what it is to be taught, to learn and to teach. The Kids a Poetry Book Society Choice won the 2021 Costa Poetry Award and went on to be named Costa Book of the Year, and was also shortlisted for the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Macedonia's Nikola Madzirov is one of the most powerful voices in contemporary European poetry. Born in a family of Balkan War refugees in Strumica in 1973, he grew up in the Soviet era in the former Republic of Yugoslavia ruled by Marshall Tito. When he was 18, the collapse of Yugoslavia prompted a shift in his sense of identity - as a writer reinventing himself in a country which felt new but was still nourished by deeply rooted historical traditions. The example and work of the great East European poets of the postwar period - Vasko Popa, Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert - were liberating influences on his writing and thinking. The German weekly magazine Der Spiegel compared the quality of his poetry to Tomas Transtromer's. There is a clear line from their generation, and that of more recent figures like Adam Zagajewski from Poland, to Nikola Madzirov, but Madzirov's voice is a new 21st century voice in European poetry and he is one of the most outstanding figures of the post-Soviet generation. Remnants of Another Age, his first book of poetry published in English, is introduced by Carolyn Forche, who writes: 'Madzirov calls himself "an involuntary descendant of refugees", referring to his family's flight from the Balkan Wars a century ago: his surname derives from mazir or majir, meaning "people without a home". The ideas of shelter and of homelessness, of nomadism, and spiritual transience serves as a palimpsest in these Remnants' - while Madzirov himself tells us in one of his poems, 'History is the first border I have to cross.' Bilingual Macedonian-English edition. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Tess Gallagher's new poems are suspended between contradiction and beauty. Is, Is Not upends our notions of linear time, evokes the spirit and sanctity of place, and journeys toward discovering the full capacity of language. Gallagher's poems reverberate with the inward clarity of a bell struck on a mountaintop and hover daringly at the threshold of what language can nearly deliver while offering alternative corollaries as gifts of its failures. Guided by humour, grace, and a deep inquiry into the natural world, every poem nudges us toward moments of awe. How else except by delight and velocity would we discover the miracle within the ordinary? Gallagher claims many Wests - the Northwest of America, the north-west of Ireland, and a West even further to the edge, beyond the physical. These landscapes are charged with invisible energies and inhabited by the people, living and dead, who shape Gallagher's poems and life. Restorative in every sense, Is, Is Not is the kind of book that takes a lifetime to write - a book of the spirit made manifest by the poet's unrelenting gaze and her intimate engagement with the mysteries that keep us reaching. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Kafka said we should read books which bite and sting: 'If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the head, what's the point in reading? A book must be the axe which smashes the frozen sea within us.' Brian Hinton applied this to Neil Astley's anthology Poetry with an Edge, which 'crystallises what he has already achieved with Bloodaxe, well designed and committed books, though never comfortable to read. They answer Kafka's definition of what real literature should be.' New Blood is the sequel to Poetry with an Edge, which marked Bloodaxe's first decade of poetry publishing. This completely new anthology brings together poets who have published their first collections during the past ten years. New Blood shows that Bloodaxe isn't going rusty with age, for here are some of the sharpest new talents in poetry - with poems which bite and sting as well as disturb and delight the reader. This book of new poetry from Bloodaxe 'must be the axe which smashes the frozen sea within us'. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. 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. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. 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. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Even in peacetime, many women find themselves isolated in a wartime of their own when their loved ones are involved in conflicts overseas. As mothers or wives they live in a state of separation, from husbands, sons or daughters in permanent danger - or so they feel - as well as from an often alienating everyday world of people who have no idea of what anxieties and fears grip them every minute. They also find themselves switching back and forth between two time zones, between the present moment and what might have been happening several hours ago in the Middle East. Home Front presents the poetry of four such women, Bryony Doran and Isabel Palmer, both mothers of young British soldiers serving in Afghanistan; and two American poets, Jehanne Dubrow, wife of a serving US naval officer deployed to the Persian Gulf and other conflict zones, and Elyse Fenton, wife of a US army medic posted to Iraq. It brings together four full-length collections by these writers; those by the two British poets are debut collections first published in full in this book. The poems in Bryony Doran's Bulletproof tell a chronological story, from her son's unexpected decision to join the army through his tours in and returns from Afghanistan. Covering every emotion from fear to fury, yet lifted by humour and details of everyday domestic life, these are poems written to preserve a pacifist mother's sanity as each day plays itself out. They show her coping with The News, her fantasies, his short spells of home leave, and her realisation that both are imprisoned in a modern myth. The narrative in Isabel Palmer's Atmospherics begins with seeing her only son go to war in Afghanistan soon after his 21st birthday in 2011 and ends with his final, safe return in 2015. His role there was to lead foot patrols and to operate machines for detecting improvised explosive devices. While he was on tour, she wrote one poem every week reflecting on their experiences. The earlier poems appeared in Ground Signs (Flarestack Poets, 2014), a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Driven by intellectual curiosity and emotional exploration, the poems in Jehanne Dubrow's Stateside (2010) are remarkable for their subtlety, sensual imagery and technical control. The speaker attempts to understand her own life through the long history of military wives left to wait and wonder, invoking Penelope's plight in Homer's Odyssey as a model but also as a source of mystery. Dubrow is fearless in her contemplation of the far-reaching effects of war but even more so in her excavation of a marriage under duress. At times quiet, at others cacophonous, the poems of Elyse Fenton's Clamor turn a lyric lens on the language we use to talk about war and atrocity, and the irreconcilable rifts - between lover and beloved, word and thing - such work unearths. Originally published in the US - but not in the UK - in 2010, Clamor was the first book of poetry to win Britain's Dylan Thomas Prize. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. With its flighty parables and skewed morality tales, The Wilderness Party is an unforgettable record of turbulent times. These are poems of finely-wrought musicality, bristling energy and playful excess. From cream cakes on Shetland to Camberwick Green, from Lyuba the Siberian mammoth to the madness of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, A.B. Jackson approaches personal and historical events with a mixture of wit and wonder. Included in the opening section of individual lyrics is 'Treasure Island', winner of the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition. The series 'Natural History' takes a spirited linguistic tour through Pliny the Elder in Elizabethan translation to uncover the myths, mysteries, and uncanny familiarities of animal behaviour. In the twenty-one short fictions of 'Apocrypha', high ideals cavort with low befuddlement as re-cast Biblical characters attempt to make sense of the modern world. The Wilderness Party is Jackson's long-awaited follow-up to his Forward Prize-winning first collection Fire Stations. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. . The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. The northern word for hometown, 'toon', flickers in meaning between 'tune' and 'cartoon'. In Bill Herbert's big bumper book, the title toon is Troy: the first lost home. Exiled to a lighthouse on the River Tyne, the wily Scots maestro has written a book in love with lost and difficult things. Sometimes reflective, sometimes subversively mischievous, he registers or rails against displacement and resettlement, lamenting the passing of relatives, cities, furniture, and the odd lemur. Plugged in to the poetry zeitgeist as ever, Herbert has revived a medieval publishing craze: the Troybook. Painstaking excavation of old comics establishes that the original site of Troytoon is Dundee. Or Madrid. Or possibly St Petersburg. The search for traces of Troy leads to Donegal, Crete, and, at the heart of his grand tour, a vivid verse journal set in post-perestroika Moscow. Dust off your highest brow and fasten your seatbelt, we're flying Economy to Byzantium. The Big Bumper Book of Troy is driven by sudden shifts of register - English to Scots, free verse to antique stanza, page to performance, narrative to lyric. Everything has become a dialect, yet - cheekily borrowing the Russian composer Schnittke's term - Herbert aims at a disrespectful polystylist unity. It is his most unorthodox rebellion yet against the dictatorship of the slim volume. A riot of colourful humour, a revolution in poetic taste. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. 'Geis' is a word from Irish mythology meaning a supernatural taboo or injunction on behaviour. In her long-awaited third collection, Caitriona O'Reilly examines the 'geis' in all of its psychological, emotional, and moral suggestiveness: exploring the prohibitions and compulsions under which we sometimes place ourselves, or find ourselves placed. In poems that range from the searingly personal to the more playfully abstract and philosophical, O'Reilly's characteristic imaginative range and linguistic verve are everywhere in evidence. These are poems that question our sometimes tenuous links with the world, with others, and even with ourselves, but which ultimately celebrate the richness of experience and the power of language to affirm it. Geis is Caitriona OReilly's third collection. It won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2016, and was shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize. It follows her critically acclaimed earlier books, The Nowhere Birds (2001), shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and The Sea Cabinet (2006), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation which was also shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Poetry has always been bound up with ideas of endurance, redemption, consolation, and survival, and it is one of the best antidotes to depression. We Have Come Through brings together 100 poems celebrating individual courage in resisting the ravages of psychological trauma, induced by both external events and mental breakdown. The book moves through sections covering intimations of alienation, the causes of madness, the individuals experience at the nadir, through to healing and redemption. The final section has poems that can function as a charm against adversity and as part of our emotional repair kit. Especially powerful are those poems charting the emergence of hope after despair. Poems like George Herberts The Flower convince the reader that both the despair and the alleviation were real for the writer and they hold out the promise that relief does come. Peter Forbes has chosen poems that range in time and scope from Shakespeare, Clare and Blake, through Hardy, Auden, MacNeice and Stevie Smith, to John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and many contemporary poets. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. 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. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Being Alive is the sequel to Neil Astleys Staying Alive, which became Britains most popular poetry book because it gave readers hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world. Now he has assembled this equally lively companion anthology for all those readers whove wanted more poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit. Being Alive is about being human: about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder. Staying Alive didnt just reach a broader readership, it introduced thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry, giving them an international gathering of poems of great personal force, poems with emotional power, intellectual edge and playful wit. It also brought many readers back to poetry, people who hadnt read poetry for years because it hadnt held their interest. Being Alive gives readers an even wider selection of vivid, brilliantly diverse contemporary poetry from around the world. Being Alive was followed by 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. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. 'Hanzlik's poetry, more particularly his early poetry, is characterised by controlled savagery, by a smouldering anger, though balanced and held in check by a note of lyricism and often indeed of tenderness. He is a master of the medium-long poem: in his earlier collections were often evocations of classical or Biblical subjects (though with an entirely modern and often topical subtext), while some of the more recent ones are meditations on casual topics, such as his stamp collection, a news item about a scientist's Nobel Prize, or a flight of fighter aircraft overflying his home on Air Day. At a time when so much Czech poetry is either politically declarative or traditionally escapist, Hanzlik's unmistakable individual voice, bruising though it may be, is refreshingly new.' - Ewald Osers 'The fluency and energy are unmistakable, and at the centre of the poems there is a real and difficult subject: political violence. Killings, mutilations, stiflings, beheadings occur in poem after poem, and are connected in some way with people in authority. Hanzlik uses dramatic monologues by invented or legendary or historical personae.' - Graham Martin, from his preface. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Enigmatic, unusual, highly skilful, a totally original first book, The First Death of Venice was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 1987. Martin Stokes won a Gregory Award in 1983. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. 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. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Pauline Stainer is a poet 'working at the margins of the sacred', conveying sensations 'with an economy of means that is breathtaking.her poems are not merely artefacts, they have an organic life of their own' (John Burnside). As in all her books, the luminous poems of her ninth collection Sleeping under the Juniper Tree are minimal but highly charged - with presences and hauntings, sensing the spirit incarnate in every part of the living world. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Lawrence Sail's poetry is noted for its scrupulous combination of close observation and broader reflections. In Guises he builds on the strengths of twelve previous collections, writing 'in praise of perception', which brings its own challenges and delights, embodied in the shifts and layers of language. A sense of the precious and the precarious informs poems with widely differing subjects and settings. There is, too, a new awareness of the threat to the sumptuousness of the natural world posed by human profligacy. Sounding the provisional nature of our earth-bound experiences, Sail knows the closeness of eulogy to elegy, and his poems celebrating the immediacy of human affections and experience sit aptly alongside those remembering friends who have died. Forty-six years on from the publication of Sail's first book, Guises offers the fruits of fullness. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. French Love Poems is about the kinds of love that puzzle, delight and af?ict us throughout our lives, from going on walks with an attractive cousin before Sunday dinner (Nerval) to indulging a granddaughter (Hugo). On the way theres the ?rst yes from lips we love (Verlaine), a sky full of stars re?ected fatally in Cleopatras eyes (Heredia), Iying awake waiting for your lover (Valery), and the defeated toys of dead children (Gautier). The selection covers ?ve centuries, from Ronsard to Valery. Other poets represented include Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, La Fontaine, Laforgue and Leconte de Lisle. The 35 poems, chosen by Alistair Elliot, are printed opposite his own highly skilful verse translations. There are also helpful notes on French verse technique and on points of obscurity. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. George Szirtes came to England as an eight-year-old refugee after the Hungarian uprising. His two earlier Bloodaxe selections The Budapest File and An English Apocalypse brought together his poems on Hungarian and English themes. In this later collection, Reel, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the exile's obsessive quest for the nature of humane truth is the focus of poems of visionary sweep which pan out across a life. Memory is film in Reel: a film-crew shoot Budapest for Berlin; faces float like light on the sea; names appear and disappear on a search engine. George Szirtes reconstructs childhood from a confusion of memories, photographs and stories in which men and women change places and fathers multiply. There are sequences on love, desire and illusion, poems about political loyalties, and poems that form ghost texts shadowing other writers. Reel is now includes in his New & Collected Poems. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Fine. Hello. Your promise has been extracted is Ahren Warner's third collection of poems, a book in which the lyric runs in parallel with a series of photographs made by the author across Europe. From Paris, Berlin and Budapest, to Athens during the height of the Greek debt crisis and Kiev in the wake of the Maidan Revolution, the poems and images of this book form what Immanuel Kant might have called a cosmopolitan dialogue: a conversation between two speakers in two utterly different languages. Though the poems here often begin in conversation with writers and thinkers - from Celan and Plato to David Foster Wallace and Emmanuel Levinas - they are also profoundly and emotionally engaged with the realities of the contemporary world. Hello. Your promise has been extracted is not a polemic. It is neither witness nor reportage. Rather, it is a book that offers an insistent performance of poetic dialogue with the visual, philosophical and human experience it confronts. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. "The Blue Den" is a book of lyrical, sensuous poems which builds on the achievement of Stephanie Norgate's debut collection "Hidden River", which was shortlisted for both the Forward First Collection Prize and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In "The Blue Den", people travel along the edges of roads, landscapes and emotions. The poems give voice to a stream under ice, a flooded road, and an ant beneath the sky. Strongly visual and imaginative, these poems explore the edges of memory, the mutual dependency of man and nature. Stephanie Norgate's second collection celebrates the power of intense looking and making, whether meditating on refugees in an oarless boat or Giacometti working restlessly at the figure of a strange walker. These poems inhabit marginal, unsung and free experiences: plastic bags along a road or the return of children over a lake. The underside resonates with strange vivid beauty. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. In the spring of 1989, the world watched breathlessly as the pro-democracy movement swept across China, and it recoiled in horror as the Communist regime sent troops and tanks to crush the unarmed protesters in Tiananmen Square. In uniting China's students, workers, and intellectuals in nonviolent protest, the pro-democracy movement became the most vivid manifestation of the long-simmering ferment beneath the official surface of Chinese society. During the past decade, a generation of strong-willed writers and artists has arisen in China, determined to gain intellectual and political freedom despite the rigidities of traditional Chinese culture and the repression of the ruling gerontocracy. Seeds of Fire provides a critical selection of the original works of these controversial writers and artists whose ideas inspired the events of 1989. It is a powerful, and moving, glimpse into the politics and the conscience of a still-volatile Chinese society. 'This is the single volume that every English reader who is interested in China should read.' - Stephen Shwartz, San Francisco Chronicle 'An angry and impassioned anthology which covers, better than any earlier collections, the whole range of dissident Chinese voices. Here are poets and visual artists, essayists and cartoonists, rock lyricists and novelists, all fighting for room to express themselves. All those interested in modern China should reflect on these frustrated voices.' - Jonathan Spence 'Seeds of Fire fills a yawning gap; it thrusts a candle of illumination into the dark shadow of ignorance that has long cast itself over the world's most populous country.' - Richard Bernstein, The New York Times 'These selections from dissident works are not mere protests but artistic fiction, honest reporting, and efforts at original thinking - writing that is rewarding reading.' - The New Yorker. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.