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...

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 ...

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, intensely moving, tender, and intimate, are some of Margaret Atwood’s most accomplished and versatile works. Some draw on history and some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, an...

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 first book of poems by Oli Hazzard, this compilation exposes its author as a consummate master of language, a gifted writer of free verse with the ability to write in traditional poetic forms and stretch the forms to their limits. Through lyrical poems and satires, this collection explores contrasting milieus such as city and country and reality and dream, while subjects such as thefts and love affairs are expressed through palindromes, mirrored poems, and homophonic translations.

A T. S. Eliot Prize–winning collection from one of Ireland's major contemporary poetsPARALLAX: ( Astron.) Apparent displacement, or difference in the apparent position, of an object, caused by actual change (or difference) of position of the point of observation. (OED)In Parallax Sinéad Morrissey documents what is caught, and what is lost, when houses and cityscapes, servants and saboteurs ("the different people who lived in sepia"), are arr...

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...

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...

‘This first book is packed with clear-eyed veracity, offers a shining resilience, personal insight and shared comfort…we are enjoined, a chorus.’ – Les WicksFew poets express the meeting of nature and emotion as tenderly as Susan McCreery. Her poems open with images of nature and draw the reader in to scenarios of such heartbreak and love it is at times hard to surface. The sparkle of a boy playing in the surf, the metallic sound of betrayal on a Greek island, the humidity of a sum...

Dear Room is a worthy successor to Billy's Rain (1999), whose preoccupations and occasions it continues and ramifies, charting the 'angles, signals, orders, murmurs, sighs' of love, separation and loss. With grave good humour, ruefully exact timing and a scruple reminiscent of Thomas Hardy, these poems register the goodbye look of things, and ponder the difference between a good memory and an inability to forget. By turns candid, caustic and drastically self-accusing, the...