In his foreword to this book, Derek Mahon notes that P.J. Kavanagh's poems elude the obvious categories. He has never been one of a "school". A poet of rural England, yet of Irish ancestry, Kavanagh has always stood slightly apart. He championed the poems of Ivor Gurney and shares with Gurney not only a personal landscape (that of Gloucestershire) but a poetic commitment to the actual and specific, to nature writing at its most rootedly precise. His is, in Mahon's words, a unique personal ...

Archipelago is one of the most important and influential literary magazines of the lasttwenty years. Running to twelve editions, it was edited by Andrew McNeillie, with theassistance later of James McDonald Lockhart, and began as an attempt to reimagine therelationships between the islands of Ireland and Britain. Archipelago has brought togetherestablished and emerging artists in creative conversations that have transformed the studyof islands, coasts and...

"The marvelous and the horrific, the mythic and the mundane overlap and intermingle in this wonderfully inventive novel." — The New York TimesWinner of the E. M. Forster AwardIn a fantastic world that is and is not seventeenth-century England, a baby is found floating in the Thames. The child, Jordan, is rescued by Dog Woman and grows up to travel the globe like Gulliver—though he finds that the most curious oddities come from his ...

From the Irish Nobel laureate: Essential poems selected by the author from throughout his career, plus several previously unselected works and his Nobel lecture."[This collection] eloquently confirms his status as the most skillful and profound poet writing in English today." —Edward Mendelson, The New York Times Book ReviewOpened Ground includes the essential poems from Seamus Heaney's twelve previous vo...

Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests; snug as a gun.-- from 'Digging'With its lyrical and descriptive powers, Death of a Naturalist marked the auspicious debut of one of the century's finest poets.

This volume contains a selection of work from each of Seamus Heaney's published books of poetry up to and including the Whitbread prize-winning collection, The Haw Lantern (1987).'His is 'close-up' poetry - close up to thought, to the world, to the emotions. Few writers at work today, in verse or fiction, can give the sense of rich, fecund, lived life that Heaney does.' John Banville'More than any other poet since Wordsworth he can make us understand that ...

For the first time, the vast canon of the poetry of Ted Hughes - winner of the Whitbread and Forward Prizes and former Poet Laureate - together in a single e-book.The Collected Poems spans fifty years of work, from Hawk in the Rain to the best-selling Birthday Letters. It also includes the complete texts of such seminal publications as Crow and Tales from Ovid as well as those children's poems that Hughes felt crossed over into adult poetry. Most...

Elizabeth Stone, a respected academic, has a new lease on life. In remission from cancer, she returns to the city where she was a student over thirty years ago to investigate some little-known papers by T. S. Eliot, which she believes contain the seeds of her masterpiece; a masterpiece that centres on a poem given to her when she was eighteen by the elusive Professor Hunt...But as the days pass in the city she loves and her friendship with Professor Hunt is rekindled, her memories ...

In the warm alkaline waters of the public bath a headstrong young engineer accidentally collides with a beautiful actress. From this innocent collision of flesh begins a passion that takes them from the Wiltshire Downs to the most elemental choices of life and death in the Australian desert. Their intense romance is but part of the daring story that unfolds. Mingling history, myth and technology with a modern cinematic and poetic imagination, Robert Drewe presents a fable of European ambit...

A best of R.S. Thomas's poems in a beautiful new gift editionR. S. Thomas (1913- 2000) was born in Cardiff. He studied classics, then theology and, after ordination, served six rural Welsh parishes for most of his life. His first book of poems was published in 1946. He won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1964 and published regularly, Collected Poems 1945-90 marking his eightieth birthday.

This volume replaced Ted Hughes's Selected Poems 1957-1981. It contains a larger selection from the same period, to which are added poems from more recent books, uncollected poems from each decade of Ted Hughes's writing life, and some new work. Another notable feature is the inclusion of poems from his books for younger readers, What is the Truth? and Season Songs.

'An irresistibly coherent book which celebrates the rising and the raising of the human spirit.' Michael Hofmann, The Times'If any poetry written today can have this 'redemptive effect' - as Heaney in his critical writing has begun to claim it can - then this is it.' Mick Imlah, Independent on Sunday