'After many years I had excised myself from the life I had led in town, just as one might cut a figure out of a landscape or group photo. Abashed by the harm I had wreaked on the picture left behind, and unsure where the cut-out might end up next, I lived a provisional existence. I did so in a place where I knew none of my neighbours, where the street names, views, smells and faces were all unfamiliar to me, in a cheaply appointed flat where I would be able to lay my life aside for a while...

This anthology brings together the work of nineteen poets from a dozen different countries, with translations from at least seven languages, to provide a rich mix of contemporary voices. Here you can move from the Australian desert to an English coal mine, from the interior world of Grace Darling to the mythic world of the Ramayana, from earthquakes in New Zealand to gardens in France. A common thread is migration, in many senses; another is the beguilements and betrayals of memory. The po...

Thomas Mann's later short stories published between 1925 and 1953 explore his abiding interest in human nature and his surroundings. Disorder and Early Sorrow and Mario and the Magician originate from Mann's own experiences: domestic life at the height of inflation under the early Weimar Republic; and a symbolic encounter with Fascism during an Italian holiday. The Transposed Heads: An Indian Legend is tongue-in-cheek legend set in ancient times and The Law is a subtly ironic narrative abo...

'One of the most prominent non-fiction writers of her generation' GUARDIANAnnie Dillard has spent a lifetime examining the world around her with eyes wide open, drinking in all things intensely and relentlessly. Whether observing a sublime lunar eclipse or a moth consumed in a candle flame, the trembling of lily pads on a pond or hundreds of red-winged blackbirds taking flight, Dillard's awe at the fragility of the natural world rejuvenates and inspires pl...

The poems in Robert Hass's new collection—his first to appear in a decade—are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.His familiar landscapes are here—San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country—in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the vio...

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.

Heaven's Thieves is a collection engaged with the big questions -- What are bodies for? What does it mean to be alive? What is beauty and why does it have such power over us? What is the point of art? -- and the urgent ones -- how to live in a shattered ecology, what to do about grief, illness, betrayal. Sinclair turns her attention to these questions with fearless curiosity, economy, and an originality born of her willingness to pursue her own line of inquiry to its limit. These poems get...

'Seamus Heaney has gone beyond the themes of his earlier poetry and has made the giant step towards the most ambitious, most intractable themes of maturity. The power of this book comes from a sense that he is reaching out towards a type of desolation and of isolation without which no imagination can be seen to have grown up.' Eavan Boland, Irish Times'Keyed and pitched unlike any other significant poet at work in the language anywhere.' Harold Bloom, Times Literary Su...

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...

'Mist fills the Himalayan valleys, and monsoon rain sweeps across the hills. Sometimes, during the day, a bird visits me-a deep purple whistling thrush. She perches on the window sill, and looks out with me at the rain.' This personal diary records the many small moments that constitute a life of harmony-with the self, the natural world, and friends, family and passersby. In these pages, we watch a wild plum blossom and the moon come up between two deodar trees; we hear a redstart whistle ...

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...

In her book, Escarpment: Fibonacci poetry, Virginia Gow has applied the Fibonacci sequence of numbers to her poetry by counting the syllables in the words to determine the length of the lines.The subsequent patterns make for a visually appealing book, quite aside from the pleasures of Virginia's poetry.Leonardo Pisano Bigollo, who was also known as Fibonacci, was a brilliant Italian mathematician who lived in the Middle Ages from c. 1170 – c. 1250.Fibonacci is credi...