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No Far Shore is a rich exploration of various coastlines across England, Wales, Ireland, Canada and the US, in the form of travel writing, narrative non-fiction, memoir and poetry. In it poet Anne-Marie Fyfe visits the meeting place of land and sea, and takes in the maps, waves, lighthouses, islands, north, journeys, boats and fishermen which mark this changing boundary. She looks too at the work of a number of writers for whom the coast has been influential (and who in some cases have a surprising link to her hometown of Cushenden in Northern Ireland). They include Elizabeth Bishop, Herman Melville, Eavan Boland, Moira O'Neill, Robinson Jeffers, George Mackay Brown, C.P. Cavafy and Louis MacNeice. In addition, Fyfe also travels into her past, and that of her family, and charting her own relationship with a number of coasts and the way that they have shaped her life and those of others. Living next to the sea brings almost as many subjects as the waves falling on to the land, from the quiet ease of fishing to the impact of the shipwreck of the Princess Victoria, from the lyricism of nature poetry to the specialism of morse code and cartography.
Understudies brings together new poems of optimism and isolation, of assumed and confused identities, with some of the poems from Anne-Marie Fyfe's previous three collections that first brought readers into this world of lives at once chaotic and oddly consolatory that lie below placid surfaces.
Anne-Marie Fyfe's poems have long dwelt on the role that the spaces we inhabit, the places in which we find security, play in our lives: The House of Small Absences is an observation window into strange, unsettling spaces--a deserted stage-set, our own personalised 'museum', a Piedmont albergo, underground cities, Midtown roof-gardens, convent orchards, houseboats, a foldaway circus, a Romanian sleeper-carriage--the familiar rendered uncanny through the distorting lenses of distance and life's exigencies, its inevitable lettings-go. There is a winning intimacy to the shorter poems, they clear our palates and prepare us for the longer, more involved set pieces with all of their carefully delineated and often darkly gorgeous imagery.
The tragic death of Michael Donaghy last year at the age of 50 left English-language poetry incalculably the poorer. Donaghy was one of our very finest poets, and his metaphysically dense yet emotionally direct verse had won him admirers all over the world. No one demonstrated more eloquently how poetry could engage the whole being: he believed that a poem should both communicate directly and work at the highest intellectual level. At the time of his death, Donaghy was at work on a new collection, and Safest gathers together all the poems he had decided were worthy of inclusion in that book. It will be no surprise that Donaghy's early death and almost impossibly exacting standards have produ...
"Eleven Rooms, Claire Dyer's first collection, explores contradictions inherent in ideas of the permanent. The poems hold on to what's transient: the moment of a girl on the back of a boy's motorbike - a moment with no start and no end, the exquisite pain of watching children grow up and away, the flex and flux of relationships, and what death takes from us. In these poems, houses and rooms embody this paradox: they are stripped of furniture, demolished and replaced. Yet the idea of the house lives on, while what happened within its walls remains unalterable fact. Claire Dyer's poems tell of an intimate quest for equilibrium in a world constantly tilting: they find joy in the journey, adventure, acceptance and affection for things past; they remind us that although the sand slips through our fingers, we hold it warm and dry a while."--Publisher description.
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Reading Snow Calling is like delicately stepping onto snow itself; the poems resonate elusiveness with precision, the concrete with the fleeting. They explore the equivocal nature of ordinary moments. They are subtly crafted in their free verse, allowing the language to take the reader on a journey of the human condition: the rawness of living is presented in a poignant and at times mysterious way, questioning the silences of nature. They are accessible to all those who are willing to listen to the snow calling.
An unforgettable portrait of London and one of the most talked about debuts of all time! 'The almost preposterous talent was clear from the first pages' Guardian On New Years Day 1975, the day of his almost-suicide, life said yes to Archie Jones. Not OK or 'You-might-as-well-carry-on-since-you've-started'. A resounding affirmative. Promptly seizing his second life by the horns, Archie meets and marries Clara Bowden, a Caribbean girl twenty-eight years his junior. Thus begins a tale of friendship, of love and war, of three culture and three families over three generations . . . ***** 'Street-smart and learned, sassy and philosophical all at the same time' New York Times 'Outstanding' Sunday Telegraph 'An astonishingly assured début, funny and serious . . . I was delighted' Salman Rushdie
"This Long Winter contains poems that are meditations on life in the rural world: reflections on hard work, aging, and the ravages of time-erasures that Sutphen attempts to ameliorate with her careful attention to language. These poems move us from delight in precise description to wisdom and solace in the things of this world. Noticing its details, the snowflakes, clementines, the lilies, the cardinal's call, is the key for this momentary stay against time that comes at us in a rush. The many mirror images in these poems point to the complexity and hard, loving work of really living in the world. And now, in the deep mid-winter, deep in the enforced slowdown of this pandemic, we need these poems to help us know what to do with the past and how to live and how to love"--