Convergence, n, the act or point of converging; the movement of eyes focusing on an object; the meeting place of eight poets. Many forces converge in this anthology, not least the eight finalists from the Earlyworks Press Poetry Collection Competition: Andie Lewenstein, John Wilks, Eilidh Thomas, Anthony Watts, June Wentland, Mick Evans, Rata Gordon and Angela Arnold. Walk through a wood with Andie Lewenstein, taste icicles made of sugar, brick-dus...

The renowned poet and author of The Handmaid’s Tale “brings a swift, powerful energy” to this “intimate and immediate” poetry collection (Publishers Weekly).These beautifully crafted poems—by turns dark, playful, tender, and intensely moving—come together as Atwood's most accomplished and versatile gathering of poems to date, “setting foot on the middle ground/between body and word.” Some draw on history, and on myth, both classic...

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. The language of Jen Hadfield's poetry is one of incantation and secular praise. Her first book, Almana, was a traveller's litany, featuring a road movie in poems set in the north of Scotland. Nigh-No-Place is the liturgy of a poet passionately aware of the natural world.Hadfield began her new book on the hoof, travelling across Canada, hungry for new landscapes. She took epic routes: the railway from Halifax to Vancouver and the Dempster Highway's 740 km of ...

Among the poems that open Night, David Harsent's follow-up to his Forward Prize-winning collection Legion, is a startling sequence about a garden - but a garden unlike any other. It sets the tone for a book in which the sureties of daylight become uncertain: dark, unsettling narratives about what wakes in us when we escape our day-lit selves to visit a place where the dream-like and the nightmarish are never far apart. The book culminates in the seductive and brilliantly...

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICEThe Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, Alice Oswald's first collection of poems, announced the arrival of a distinctive new voice. Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the book introduced readers to her meditative, intensely musical style, and her breath-taking gift for visionary writing.'The poetry of Alice Oswald arrives like a zephyr . . . a fresh and exciting first collection.' Kathleen Jamie, Times Literary Supplement'an...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2013 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION In 2007 Rebecca Goss's newborn daughter Ella was diagnosed with Severe Ebstein's Anomaly, a rare and incurable heart condition. She lived for sixteen months. Her Birth is a book-length sequence of poems beginning with Ella's birth, her short life and her death, and ending with the joys and complexities that come with the birth of another child. Goss navigates the difficult territory of grief and loss in poems that are spare, tender...

In Between Two Windows, his first book of poems, Oli Hazzard takes language out to stretch and flex and bend itself into new shapes. Into the formal straits of sestinas, sonnets and pantoums stray palindromes, mirrored poems, anagrams, allusions and curiosities. His lyrics and satires dance in the spaces that open up between intention and expression, the moment when the horse attempts to throw its rider.

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2009 T.S. ELIOT PRIZE WINNER OF THE IRISH TIMES POETRY NOW AWARD 2010 Sinéad Morrissey's fourth collection explores fertility, pregnancy, and the landscape of early childhood in poems that are by turns tender, exuberant and unsettling. Pitched against the envious dead, these diverse narratives of birth and its consequences are rooted in literary and historical contexts - from Aristotle's theory of spontaneous generation to Lewis Carroll's Alic...

These poems report on worlds both robust and delicate, from boisterous pub-bluff to the oxygen bubble of an exquisite underwater spider. Whether situated in the quiet lanes of his native Co Cork or amid the bustle of his adopted London, Riordan's poems exist between many states, poised at once in the grip of both activity and stillness, concerned with speaking and listening to what he hauntingly describes as 'the unwonted quiet'. There are tributes to the departed and the living, the befri...

For two decades New Poetries has been a proving-ground for new poets in English from around the world. Here readers first encountered, in generous selections, work by, among others, Caroline Bird, Stephen Burt, Sophie Hannah, Emma Jones, Nicole Krauss, Patrick McGuinness, Kei Miller, David Morley, Sinéad Morrissey, Togara Muzanenhamo, Matthew Welton and Jane Yeh. Published from Manchester, the anthologies overlook national borders, instead providing vistas across a worldscape.

Poems 1988-1998 is a compendium from Jo Shapcott's award-winning books Electroplating the Baby, Phrase Book and My Life Asleep. It reveals her to be a writer of ingenious, politically acute and provocative imagination and justifies her reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation.

The poems in Maurice Riordan's second collection are unusual in their recourse to the humanist belief in poetry as one of the forms of knowledge, imparting information about the observable world; but they also mix ancient wisdom (signs and wonders) with the open-ended science of the quantum age. Riordan's vision is syncretist. The old and new coexist - interrogating the book's epigraph that 'time is what keeps everything from happening at once' - and this informs his more personal poems: c...