The Claims Office is a startlingly good debut. Dai George's method is deeply engaged with narrative traditions, but the textures and imagery are often elaborate and strange.This rich surface is undercut by a mixture of rebellious energy and unflinching satire. His 'nature' poems are often anti-nature poems, and darkly funny. Lively pieces about London and New York jostle with skewed love poems. His works about his native Wales alternate between an edgy irony and the elegiac tone of the col...

Bloomsbury presents… How to Think Like a Poet: The Poets That Made Our World and Why We Need Them by Dai George, read by Ben OnwukweAn entertaining guide to history's most influential and inspiring poets – from Homer and Sappho to Shakespeare and Frank O'Hara – and how they can teach us to better understand the world around us.How did the greatest poets in history make the world anew? And what can we learn from the magic, wisdom an...

"George's ear is precise, rueful, sanative. His images amaze, yet through each poem journeys a voice we always want to know better, capable even in the tightest situations of the sort of thought you wish you'd had." – Vidyan Ravinthiran"The poems of Karaoke King are nothing less than transcendent. No tricksy stuff here. Just lucidity and formal grace: the words and the music. Their ability to move us to tears, to laughter, or contemplation of the mess we make of the world, and its extraord...

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson's delectable first novel, announced the arrival of 'a fresh voice with a mind behind it,' as Muriel Spark has written. 'She is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent deeply abides'--and her reputation and accomplishment have grown with each of her five subsequent novels.Now, with her first collection--seventeen stories that span her entire career--Jeanette Winterson reveals all the facets of her ex...

24 themed chapters.Each with 10 numbered paragraphs.Each paragraph with precisely 120 words.The sum of a life.In his beautiful and haunting new book, Charles Lambert explores the fragmentary nature of memory, how the piecing together of short recollections can reveal a greater narrative. Through chapters tackling elemental themes such as Sex, Death, and Money, Lambert assembles the narrator’s moving life story. Executed with all the grace and finesse of his ...

A fascinating prize-winning novel about a house with a fanciful little turret, built by a river. Unfolding within its rooms are lives of event and emotional upheaval. A lot happens. And the tumultuous events of the twentieth century also leave their mark, from war to economic collapse, the deaths of presidents and princesses to new waves of music, art, architecture and political ideas. Meanwhile, a few metres away in the river, another creature follows a d...

Love, angels, addiction and death; they're all here in My First Colouring Book, a collection of short stories from award-winning novelist Lloyd Jones. Themed on all the colours of the rainbow - and a few extra - these stories and essays paint a picture of criss-crossing lives. They are spoken by an unexpected variety of voices: a young girl has adventures in the night, a surgeion becomes a shepherd; a middle-aged man seeks love for the last time. And his travel essays, sent from the compas...

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...

The Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for the Winter Quarter, 2012.Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) is one of Greece's finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. Louis Aragon called him 'the greatest poet of our age'. He wrote in the face of ill health, personal tragedy and the systematic persecution by successive hard-line, right-wing regimes that led to many years in prison, or in island detention camps. Despite this, his lifetime's work ...

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...

A collection of quirky verse by Barnaby Wilde which is not at all rhinoceros. (Well, maybe just a little bit, at the end).A miscellany of verses full of weak puns, old jokes and a sense of the ridiculous, including 'A pyschiatrist's guide to empathetic garden design', 'Two flies walking on a bald man's head', and 'Acupuncture is a jab well done' amongst others.And absolutely no mention of rhinoceros (OK. perhaps a very little bit at the end).