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...

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.

Towards the end of his life the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote nearly four hundred poems in French - notably the two collections published as Les Fenêtres (The Windows) and Les Roses. The emergence of a French Rilke provides the starting point rather than the terminus for Jo Shapcott's new collection, Tender Taxes, which re-imagines Rilke's brief and fugitive lyrics as English poems. The occasion is Rilke, but these are m...

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...

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...

Mir Mahfuz Ali is an exceptional new voice in British Poetry. A native of what is now Bangladesh, Mahfuz grew up during the difficult period of the early 1970's when the region was struck, first by a devastating cyclone, then by a particularly vicious civil war. As a boy, Mahfuz witnessed atrocities and writes about them with a searing directness in poems like 'My Salma' and the title poem. But much more than this, his trauma becomes transformative, and his poetry the key to unlocking memo...

Terse and concise or rambling and hypnotic, poetry finds the music in language. Building pictures from sound, layering obvious over oblique on obscure, it secretes multiple levels of meaning for the seeking. If a picture is worth a thousand words the goal of a single word is to create a whirl of images. Reducing, condensing, saying more with less: making music in the flow of the words.

A winner of the Costa Book Award, "beautiful and moving poetry for the real world" ( The Guardian)The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy's first collection of new poems as British poet laureate, and the much anticipated successor to the T. S. Eliot Prize–winning Rapture. After the intimate focus of the earlier book, The Bees finds Duffy using her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems to the weather, and poems of poli...

'A firework display of technique, versatility and passion.' Independent on Sunday'The crafted sincerity of this potent, lyrical collection, in which an absolutely contemporary voice concisely expresses common concerns, is everything that poetry should be.' Times Literary Supplement'The first poet of serious artistic intent since Philip Larkin to have achieved popularity . . . it is possible that he will attain the sort of proverbial status Larkin now occup...

John O'Donohue won hundreds of thousands of admirers with his now classic work on Celtic spirituality, Anam Cara. Just as To Bless the Space Between Us was being published, he died suddenly at the age of fifty-two. His powerfully wise and lyrical voice is profoundly missed, but his many readers are now given a special opportunity to revisit John in his first book, a collection of poetry.O'Donohue's readers know him as both a spiritual guide and a poet. In the same ...

A brand new story from the author of The Grand Hotel.Rural Victoria 1865, the heat comes in and all the signs of the next drought on its way. At times like these no one seems to mind putting on their best clothes and making the long journey to the cool, bluestone church on a Sunday morning. but it is not only humans seeking shelter and solace on this Sunday morning.

Skin Divers is award-winning writer Anne Michaels’ dazzling third book of poems. These poems develop the concern with love, transience, and memory evident in her earlier work, and at the same time signal a definitive turning point towards a new thematic landscape.Michaels is a writer whose thoughts take shape in sensuous images, verbal music, and sinuous lines. Her short lyrics, like the longer monologues based on the lives of historical figures, explore an inner world flu...