Magma poetry magazine's summer 2014 issue, Magma 59, is on the theme of breaks. Editors Roberta James and Alex Price have selected over 65 new poems that reach in to bring a new look on a familiar scene, take us to places we have not been before, or show us new ways to be in our sometimes broken but beautiful world. After poems of great delicacy and eggshells came others of metal and grind. Poems which could make us stride forward, unshakeable and unbreakable are contrasted with those that...

Magma poetry magazine’s summer 2014 issue, Magma 59, is on the theme of breaks.Editors Roberta James and Alex Price have selected over 65 new poems that reach in to bring a new look on a familiar scene, take us to places we have not been before, or show us new ways to be in our sometimes broken but beautiful world. After poems of great delicacy and eggshells came others of metal and grind. Poems which could make us stride forward, unshakeable and unbreakable are co...

The incomparable Ali Smith melds the tale and the essay into a magical hybrid form, a song of praise to the power of stories in our livesA book that refuses to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted-literally-by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature.A hypnotic dialogue unfolds, a duet between and a meditation on art and storytelling, a book about love,...

Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time, and Rapture is essential reading for the broken-hearted of all ages' - Rose TremainThe effortless virtuosity, directness, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired and best-loved contemporary poet. Rapture, her seventh collection, is a book-length love-poem, and a moving act of personal testimony; but what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subje...

‘Beautiful and moving poetry for the real world’ Jeanette Winterson, Guardian‘Wonderful . . . a poet alert to every sound and shape of language’ Sunday TelegraphThe Bees is Carol Ann Duffy’s first collection of poems as Poet Laureate. In it she uses her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems of political anger; there are elegies, too, for beloved friends, and – most movingly – the poet’s own mother.Woven and weaving...

‘The human desire for patterned language is as strong as the need for narrative.’ —Geoff PageIn The Best Australian Poems 2015, you will find the who’s who of contemporary poets and the pick of new voices. Sometimes satirical, sometimes erotic, covering family, religion, war and mortality, Geoff Page’s selection celebrates the vital, the vigorous and the graceful voices that populate our poetry scene.Robert Adamson • Jordie Albiston • Judith Beveridge • Eileen Chon...

The first of its kind, this landmark poetry anthology contains the work of Australia's major poets as well as lesser-known but equally affecting writers of Australian poetry since 1788. Ranging from concrete to prose poems, from the cerebral to the naïve, from the humorous to the confessional, and from formal to free verse, this work also features translations of some striking Aboriginal song poems. With pieces from 170 Australian poets, as well as short critical biographies, this careful ...

Jo Shapcott's award-winning first three collections, gathered in Her Book: Poems 1988-1998, revealed her to be a writer of ingenuous, politically acute and provocative poetry, and rightly earned her a reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation. In Of Mutability, Shapcott is found writing at her most memorable and bold. In a series of poems that explore the nature of change - in the body and the natural world, and in the shifting relationshi...

Building on previous themes and introducing some new techniques, this collection reveals a respected poet at the height of his powers. Here are finely crafted lyrics, found poems, a bracket of songs, and complex emotions—all tempered by the use of humor.

A good poetry idea should help the children feel excited about writing and enable them to think of what to write - developing their imagination, creativity and writing skills.Jumpstart! Poetry is about involving children as creative writers through writing poems. The book contains a bank of ideas that can be drawn upon when teaching poetry but also at other times to provide a source for creative writing that children relish. There are more than 100 quick warm-ups to fire t...

This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.When the Barbarians Arrive is a selected works from Singaporean poet Alvin Pang's five previous collections, including Testing the Silence (1997) and City of Rain (2003). Wry, sensitive and intelligent throughout, the selection ranges from unsentimental love poems to sharply satirical writing. They mock, celebrate and unsettle, at once recognisably national and international...

If Lavinia Greenlaw's Minsk was about home, her new collection tests the proximities of elsewhere, 'the circle round our house', the road between two lives. Its title recalls a phrase of Robert Lowell's to describe Elizabeth Bishop -- one of the book's presiding spirits, with her insistence on the provisional, on the moment in which perception is formed, on landscape as action rather than description. The Casual Perfect continues Lavinia Greenlaw's explorations of light a...